


The Adventure of the Purloined Ring

by formergirlwonder (orphan_account)



Series: Adventures of Oracle and Nightwing [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: But it's mostly about these two idiots getting their act together, Canon Disabled Character, Canon What Canon?, Damian Wayne is an adorable human being, Fluff that got angsty, Gen, Humor, Mentions of Infertility, Tim Drake is So Done
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-10 16:56:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 30,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8924878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/formergirlwonder
Summary: Dick Grayson plans on proposing to the love of his life. Damian thinks that marriage is tactically unwise for Grayson, so he steals the ring. Shenanigans ensue.





	1. A Night In

**Author's Note:**

> First, I don't own Batman, etc. Secondly, and more surprisingly, I have never read a Batman comic in my life. *shrugs helplessly*. I am mainly familiar with these characters through fanfic (sue me!). So obviously, there's no good place to put this in continuity. Babs is Oracle, Dick is Nightwing. Jason has died, but nobody else has, Tim and Steph are dating, Cass speaks fairly proficient English. If anybody has questions, or wants to yell about me mangling continuity, the comments section is all yours! :D

In his decades of crime-fighting, Dick Grayson had learned to expect the unexpected. It was just about the only way to survive.  
  
But there was the _expected_ unexpected (for instance, he could practically guarantee that someone would attack the next Wayne Enterprises gala, and he had a running bet going with Tim on when Two-Face would break out of Arkham again), and then there was the _unexpected_ unexpected.  
  
Dick’s littlest brother, sopping wet in Dick’s girlfriend’s kitchen, insisting—no, _demanding_ that he (the brother) be allowed to speak with said girlfriend? Well, that was about as unexpected as unexpected got.  
  
Dick had taken off from patrol early that night, thinking he’d get a chance for a nice evening in with Babs. He’d done everything right—flowers, the promise of a cheesy movie with bad CGI—but it was to no avail. Dick sighed from his uncomfortable position on the couch.

“Huntress? Yeah, I’ve got the stats up now. Security doors should be open for you. Three goons up ahead, say ten feet. I’ll be back in two minutes. You’re welcome.” The click of a changing channel. “Yeah, hi to you too, Red. Okay…yeah, I see. I just got your transmission…yeah. Okay, backup it is. Expect—let’s see—alright, expect Batgirl and Black Bat. ETA 1 minute. No, Hood hasn’t clocked in tonight.” A pause. “Tell B that Wing is fine. I have him on the couch. No, I have Catwoman down for Wing's East End route.” Another pause. “ _What_? Alright, RR. I’m on it. Oracle out.” Another pause, a channel switching. “Batgirl, Black Bat. Double-R needs backup. I’m sending coordinates. Alright, over and out.”

He rolled off the couch and headed behind her, massaging her shoulders and neck. They were way too tense, even for someone like her. “Hey,” he purred, “how about you switch that off and we go offline for a bit?”

She made a dismissive noise. “Can’t, Nightwing. It’s a busy night.” He pouted behind her head, because Babs _knew_ he wasn’t Nightwing out of the suit. But she was always distracted when she was watching the mainframe. Babs wriggled forward out of his grip and flipped the channel. “Catwoman. Is that break-in at the Gotham Museum tangentially related to you offering to fill in for Nightwing?” A frustrated sigh. “All right. Just give the stuff back, okay, or I’ll make you. No, B’s about to clock out for the night. But _I’ll_ know if you don’t.”

“Drink your tea,” he pleaded in a whisper, leaning in to kiss her forehead. “It’s getting cold.” She held up a hand to say _later_ , and he slunk back to the couch, back to watching the way her red hair crinkled behind her ears. Back to imagining the faintly irritated furrow that her eyebrows made when she concentrated hard on something. Back to imagining her full lips, and the way that…okay, he needed to cut _that_ out right now.

The chatter over comms continued. “All quiet on the home front, B? No, Wing’s here with me. Really? Confirm with Alfred, okay? I have it that R quit fifteen minutes ago. Yeah, probably got a test tomorrow or something. Listen, I haven’t got any more pings for tonight. I’ll let you know if something comes up. Good night.” A channel switching. “Gotham PD? Delivery for you guys, coordinates 1.16123 by 57.83.9564. You’re welcome.” Another switch.

“Di? Yeah. You’re coming to town?! Okay, yeah, coffee sounds good. The 8th it is…how about eleven? I’ll let you know if anything comes up. Can I put you on the roster for that night? Okay, see you then!” A beeping light on the console. Babs frowned and switched the channel. “Okay, I’m on it.” _Click_.

“Huntress? I’m back. You done? Yeah, I’ll call it in. Can you make it over to the coordinates I’m sending? Batgirl’s gotten shot again, something about taking it for Black Bat. I know. Yeah, evac’d be great. RR’d do it, but he and Black are gonna go chase down the lead. He says it’s bad, Batgirl says a scratch, so it’s probably a medium-sized flesh wound. Alright, beep me when you arrive. Oracle out.”

Another channel change. She was murmuring more coordinates to Gotham PD. Dick reached for reading material as he settled himself deeper in to the couch. Unfortunately, all Babs had was a stack of forbidding-looking Russian literature. In the original Russian. He didn’t feel like exercising his brain, so he flopped back onto the pillows. Babs, ever the librarian, shushed him absently. “B? Confirming arrival. You got a location on Robin yet? Okay, I’ll see what I can do. Get some rest.”

Dick groaned as the channel switched again. He’d been listening to this for the better part of five hours. “Dead end? Listen, send the contents over the secure channel and I’ll put it through a couple algorithms. Yeah, it looks like they just made it back. Calm down, RR, she’s fine. Black Bat, make sure he doesn’t panic, get him some sleep, and for the love of everything you hold dear, keep him away from anything and everything caffeinated.” A pause. “Oracle out.”

He groaned again, to remind her that he was still there.

“Shhh. I’m working.”

Dick reached over the couch for her wheelchair. “Not anymore, you’re not,” he cackled, dragging her away from the console.

“Richard John Grayson, stop that this instant!” she snapped helplessly. “I need to stay on. Robin hasn’t made it back yet, and he said he’d head back fifteen minutes ago.”

He shrugged, because he _really_ didn’t want his littlest brother to make Babs nervy. Nervy Babs was not a good Babs to be around. “Let him. The kid’s growing up. You know, at that age, I _never_ came back when I was supposed to. You want to know what I did?” She hummed vaguely. Dick knew she wasn’t listening at this point, since she’d managed to pull a monitor over to her lap. “I would sneak over to Commissioner Gordon’s house and watch his daughter sleep through the window...”

“Not the time, Nightwing, that’s creepy. And things have changed since you and me.”

He placed a hand over his heart. “The rejection—it’s killing me!”

Babs snorted dryly as she zoomed in on a patch of street. “Really, Hunk Wonder? You sure you weren’t an actor ever?”

Dick strode over to her, peppering kisses down the side of her neck. Babs ignored him briefly before leaning into him abstractedly, rather like a disinterested cat. He moved the keyboard an inch away from her hands, but she merely reached for it back. He let it go. “Hey, gorgeous. Dami’s a tough kid, and I’m pretty sure he’s not in trouble. If he was, you’d know already. He’s just probably out—being a kid. Having fun. He’s only gonna be young once.” Before she had a chance to respond to that one, he’d grabbed her bridal-style and scooped her out of her chair. “We, meanwhile, are going to have some fun. You _"_ —he shook her lightly for emphasis—“work too hard. Too. Hard. Okay? I am in charge for tonight, and we are going to eat ice cream, and watch a movie, and—”

They both froze instinctively at the scuffling sound in the kitchen. Dick soundlessly lowered Babs to the couch and grabbed her escrima sticks from the side pocket of her chair. He crossed the small room in three strides and opened the door quickly. “Hello?”

Worst-case scenarios flashed through his mind. The Joker. Slade Wilson. The Calculator. Lady Shiva. One of their friends, wounded. Commissioner Gordon with a shotgun, having finally decided he didn’t want Dick anywhere near his daughter. Superman and Wonder Woman, eager for a seven-hour, early-morning, _face-to-face_ meeting with Oracle (as if that would ever happen…she was always quite a bit too eager to hide her identity. But it didn’t change the fact that he _hated_ sharing her, _even_ with the Justice League, _even_ though they only knew her as a giant green hologram of a face.) It might be one of his exes. Or even one of _her_ exes.

What he didn’t expect—couldn’t have begun to imagine expecting—was a huddled-up figure in a sopping wet Robin suit. _“Dami?”_

His brother glared at him defiantly, as rivulets of water streamed off of his spiky hair. Already, there was a small puddle forming around his soggy cape. “Grayson. I suppose it is reasonable that you would be here. I need to speak to Gordon. Alone.”

Dick opened his mouth in shock. Then, he closed it. “Um, Little D? Are you okay?”

Damian growled. “I’m fine, Grayson. Now, acquiesce to my request, or I will see to it that you have no other choice.”

Of course, out of all the nights in the world, Dami would pick tonight to visit— _Babs_? Why did Dami want to talk to _Babs?_


	2. The Confrontation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Damian hashes things out with Babs. If you think this could ever go well, think again.

It had taken considerable effort (more effort than he had intended to exert, in fact), but Damian had finally managed to dispatch Grayson to the kitchen to microwave a packet of flavored corn kernels until they were fit for human consumption. Having divested himself of his armor and cape, which Grayson had insisted on throwing in the dryer, Damian had advanced to the living room and claimed one of the armchairs.

Which meant that he now had approximately ninety seconds to make his case to Oracle.

“Dami. Is something up, kiddo? I thought you clocked out for the night.”

Damian took a deep breath. He had faced down ninjas, assassins, and the wildest villains Gotham had to offer. So why was he this afraid to confront a _crippled woman_? He checked himself. This was the Oracle, and she was not to be underestimated. “You need to break off your relations with my brother. Immediately.”

Oracle’s face remained expressionless. “Damian, are you sure you don’t want to talk to Dick about this? I’m not going anywhere.”

He balled up his fists, because couldn’t _any_ of them see the logic in his words? “You must. Your relationship to Grayson is a liability.”

Oracle cocked an eyebrow wryly. “Robin, this isn’t something you need to worry about.”

He leaped onto the coffee table so that he could loom over her. “I refuse to allow my brother to lose his life or limbs because he is preoccupied with a romantic relationship while in the field.”

“It isn’t your business, kid.”  
  
“Your inability to effectively defend yourself makes you easily targetable. A more logical partner for Grayson would be someone more effective in combat. I am more than willing to recommend a replacement, but Grayson, unlike you and I, is incapable of thinking logically. He is absurdly devoted to you, and my analysis of your prior entanglements is clear: the most effective way in which to end such an attachment is for you to leave him.”

Oracle wasn’t impressed. Even mildly so. “Really? Damian, I don’t get what’s going on with you.”

“You can’t let Grayson make this commitment! It’s _illogical_! His duty is _clearly_ to his family, Gordon! It is Father’s responsibility to select his—”  
  
“What’s Bruce selecting _now_? My underwear?” inquired Dick mildly from the doorway.

“Grayson. This conversation does not concern you.”  
  
His brother raised an eyebrow questioningly. “Thought I heard my name, kiddo. That’s all.” Gordon had maneuvered herself into a sitting position and was reaching for a monitor.

Unfortunately, Grayson intercepted her. It was as if he’d forgotten all about Dami. “Barbara Gordon, what are you doing?”  
  
_How could they be so blind? If someone were to attack this instant, he’d probably insist on defending her, even though his survival would be the only possible positive outcome to such an attack if the enemy were a dangerous one._ Oracle ignored Nightwing, maneuvering herself gently into her wheelchair. “I need to report to B that Robin’s fine. If I don’t, he’ll drive himself crazy, and he won’t get any rest.” A beep from the monitor. “Oh, and the intel Tim recovered from that dead drop just came through. You and Dami start the movie, OK? Keep each other company, just give me a sec.”  
  
It was further proof of his brother’s imbecility that Grayson didn’t immediately consent to allow Gordon to work, even though her business was highly significant to their continued survival. Clearly, this had to be stopped. Grayson blocked Gordon halfway into the chair. “Babs?”  
  
“Mmmh?”  
  
“Why are you contacting Bruce?”  
  
Gordon rolled her eyes, but Damian observed the myriad relaxations of her body language. “I just told you, Dimwit Wonder. ‘If I don’t, he’ll drive himself crazy, and he won’t get any rest.’ You know how he is if he’s been worried. Besides, Selina would have my hide if I didn’t get him to sleep at a reasonable hour.”  
  
His brother made a noise that Damian assumed was meant to feign understanding. But if Gordon had been paying attention, she would have noticed the slight upward motion at the corners of his mouth. Grayson was definitely plotting something. “Alright, I see. And what were you telling Cass about Tim? I should probably call Alfred.”  
  
Gordon sighed absently. “Just that he needs to stay off of caffeine. For twenty-four hours, possibly more. Nothing that so much as resembles an energy drink. Not even tea.”  
  
He smirked. “Hey, gorgeous?”  
  
Gordon was busy trying to break past him into the chair without making herself vulnerable to his attacks. “Yeah?”  
  
Damian knew Grayson would have winked at him if he’d remembered that he was there. “When are you planning on bed?”  
  
“Sorry, Drowsy Wonder. No rest for the wicked. You go get a nap, though, if you need one.”

“And, just out of curiosity, _purely_ for accounting purposes, so I can get the right number at the store next time I go—how many caffeinated drinks have you consumed in, oh, I don’t know, the past thirteen hours?”  
  
“Twenty-three,” Gordon answered distractedly, making a sloppy jab to Grayson’s knee. He caught her hand effortlessly. “Oh, no, you don’t—cut it out right now—put me down this instant, I mean it! Just because you—aaah!”

  
His brother (there was no other word for what Grayson was doing with his eyes) _smoldered_. Smoldered with an effortless grin on his teeth as he finally swept her into his arms. Damian bit back a snicker, because he knew that grin. Even if the addition of the smolder was disconcerting, that grin was the “I-know-that-I’m-winning-this-argument-so-do-your-worst” grin. Gordon didn’t stand a chance. “Just because I what? Out-reasoned the mighty Oracle? Backed her into a deadly logic trap? Y’know,” he continued thoughtfully, observing his prey, “you really wouldn’t have fallen for that one if you’d been awake, Babs. Or even half-awake.”  
  
Damian made his way towards the doorway. He didn’t need to see the continuation of this absurd scene. “I was distracted. Now let me go, Not-a-Boy Wonder, or I’ll freeze your assets.”  
  
“Really? I don’t think you can. I have some _assets_ that are kind of freeze-resistant, or at least resistant to the kind of freezing you’re talking about. Besides, I don’t think you really want to freeze my _assets_. I think you’d _miss_ them.”  
  
Damian had edged around Grayson, ducking under Gordon as she lay prone in his arms, brushing around her dangling arm, when—  
  
That couldn’t possibly be right.  
  
“I set myself up for that, didn’t I.”  
  
Grayson’s smirk was palpable. Damian ignored it frantically, checking briefly to make sure he hadn’t mixed up Gordon’s left and right by mistake. He hadn’t. “Calm down, Babs. I am going to cook you dinn—I mean, breakfast. You are going to take a shower. We are going to eat together, and talk about stuff, and probably kiss each other senseless. And then, you are going to get no less than ten hours of solid, uninterrupted sleep. Clear?”  
  
“Depends. Is breakfast something other than cornflakes?”  
  
This was clearly a clone of Gordon, designed by one of Grayson’s former women in order to break his heart while gathering crucial intel on Family operations, and Grayson was suspicious and had thus not given her It. Or perhaps he’d lost It. Or perhaps, this was a clone of Grayson who didn’t know about It.  
  
“Why isn’t she wearing It?” he blurted.  
  
Grayson turned white as a sheet and nearly dropped Gordon. “Huh? What do you mean, Little D?” He shot Damian a definite glare before gazing back down at the woman in his arms.  
  
Damian glared right back. “You know what.”  
  
“Oh, you mean that scarf I got her for her birthday? Sorry, Babs, but I guess my brother just spoiled your surprise!”  
  
Damian scowled. Grayson was _insufferably_ dense on occasion.


	3. The Theft

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Dami understands the destructive power of a well-timed hug.

Somehow, Dick miraculously managed to get Babs settled in her chair before he dragged Dami outside. “Dami, you need to shut up. Okay? She isn’t wearing it because _I haven’t given it to her yet!_ And how the hell did you find it?!”  
  
His brother faced him down stubbornly. “And why would you not have given it to her? Have you realized, as I have, that this match is foolish and can only cause damage to Family operations? If you truly want to wed someone, I am more than happy to offer a recommendation. One possibility I had considered was the Danvers girl from National City. Admittedly, she lacks many of the defining physical features of your previous attractions, but she is capable in combat, reasonably well-tempered, and has not recently had romantic relations with any of your close friend group. Besides, she can dye her hair if you insist. And, since you asked, I uncovered it in your sock drawer when you insisted that I remain in your room for observation and monitoring.”  
  
Dick ran his hand through his hair and laughed, because _this was his life_. He was about to propose to the woman of his dreams, but she was barely paying attention to him, because she was busy trying to wrangle his vigilante adopted family into keeping a reasonable bedtime. And here he was, on the balcony of her apartment, as his thirteen-year-old adopted ninja brother offered to arrange him a marriage with an alien, having discovered a ring in Dick’s sock drawer while suffering from a concussion. “Um, thanks, Dami, but I think I’m set. Besides, I thought you liked Babs!”  
  
"Tt," said Damian. "I admire Gordon immensely. But this commitment is unwise."  
  
Dick tried not to splutter. "Look, Little D. I'm really flattered that you care, okay? But I need to do this. You'll understand when you're older. Now, why don’t you get back home? And please, please, don’t tell anyone. Not even Alfred. I want to keep it a secret.”  
  
Damian’s furious growl turned into a whimper. “I’m sorry, Grayson. I just can’t lose you. _I need you._ ” Then, without warning, he launched himself at Dick, hugging him tightly and burying his face in his shirt. Dick staggered backwards a step, and then wrapped his arms tightly around his little brother. He couldn't even remember the last time Dami had hugged him voluntarily.  
  
“Shhh. It’s okay, Little D. It’s gonna be fine, I promise. Shhh, alright? We don’t want Babs to figure out what’s going on, okay?”  
  
Damian had extricated himself from the hug with an odd look on his face. “I’m sorry, Grayson,” he said stiffly, “but this is for your own good.” Dick clapped a hand to his back pocket just as Damian escaped over the balcony railing to the Robincycle waiting below.  
  
He _really_ had to stop falling for things like that. With a sigh, Dick returned to Babs, who had used his absence to start running twenty-seven different algorithms on the data Tim had sent. “Hey, you. Listen, why don’t you get started on that shower. I just remembered that I don’t have everything I need for breakfast…unless you want cornflakes?”  
  
Dick held back his sigh of relief as she fell for it. “Alright, Chef Wonder.”  
  
He groaned. “Are you ever going to stop with the ridiculous nicknames?”  
  
“Got to be creative somehow. Besides, anybody who thinks green scaly short-shorts are an appropriate fashion choice should resign themselves to being mocked mercilessly. You’re lucky I haven’t thought of anything very biting yet.”  
  
He leaned down for one last kiss before he left. Damian already had a headstart, and his bike couldn’t keep up with Dami’s latest mechanical enhancements anyhow. An extra ten seconds to kiss his girlfriend, thereby keeping both of them in a good mood, was completely justified under the circumstances.


	4. The Box

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Cass is way too good for this family.

Cassandra Cain-Wayne was mildly surprised to see her youngest brother coming into the room, bearing an oversized pot of tea.  
  
“Cain.”  
  
She waited a few seconds for him to explain what he was doing. He scrutinized her closely, but she knew he wouldn’t find any tells. “Damian.”  
  
There was a long silence, during which it became clear that the weight of the tray was slightly off-balance. Cass gave him a few seconds to notice and correct it, but he showed no signs of moving to adjust it. In fact, she noticed as she observed him more actively, he was entirely focused on some object. Whatever the object was, it was causing lines of tension and anger to appear in his face and neck, and it was tightly clutched in his hand, fisted below the tray.  
  
The tray wavered, and she moved to collect it, placing it on her dresser. His only response was to deepen his scowl and move the object to his pocket. Cass returned to a cross-legged resting position on the bed and waited again. In a contest of patience, she could best any of her brothers.  
  
“I need your help.” She raised a slender eyebrow and shifted her knee slightly. _Go on, but I don’t have all day._ Damian cleared his throat and gazed directly at her, smoothing the lines from his face and adopting an innocent expression. “I found something on patrol tonight, and I’m worried about what it may signify. My portable scanner picked up some abnormal readings from it, and I took it back so that Oracle could look at it. Unfortunately, when I arrived, Oracle couldn’t see it. I held it out to her, and she was extremely confused as to why I was presenting her with empty air. She is now highly concerned for my sanity, as is Grayson.”  
  
“May I see?”  
  
Damian pulled his hand from behind his back to reveal a velvet box. “I haven’t opened it yet. I’m worried that its properties may be dangerous. Already, it seems to have bewitched Grayson. He tried to snatch it from me as I left. You are by far the most level-headed member of this family, which is why I am entrusting it to you.”  
  
“What else?”  
  
Damian’s eyes flickered towards the door. “That is the entirety of my report, Cain. Now do as I say.”  
  
“What do you say?” He must have observed the slight straightening of her spine— _don’t order me around, don’t mess with me, and don’t lie to me_ —because he took a step backwards.  
  
“Cain, I need you to safeguard this. Don’t tell anyone, not even Father. Everyone I’ve discussed this with has either become convinced of my mental instability or fallen under its enchantment.”

“Truth?” He deserved one more chance to tell her what was really going on. _Enchantment_?

Damian faltered. “Yes, of course I’m telling the truth, Cain!” he snapped.

She held out a hand for the box, and he relinquished it, pointedly looking away from it the instant it left his hand. “Alright.”

Immediately, his posture relaxed into a sort of cocky ease. _He thinks he fooled me._ “I’ll investigate this immediately and let you know when I find something.”

“Thank you.”

He twitched, almost imperceptibly. “For what, Cain?”

“Tea,” she said, indicating it on the dresser.

“Tt,” said Damian, striding out as if his legs couldn’t carry him fast enough. When he was gone, Cass padded over to the dresser and poured herself a cup of tea. He must have made it without asking for help from Alfred, because although he knew she liked white tea, he hadn’t guessed the correct blend, and he’d decided to add sugar for some reason. She sipped it anyway as she inspected her prize.

It didn’t appear to be anything out of the ordinary—just a small box, with a hinge on one end, a seam around the center, and black velvet fabric on the outside (low-pile). Cass shook it delicately, but the contents didn’t shift. Setting down the tea (it really wasn’t the same without jasmine), she found a scanner in the inside pocket of her purse. She swiped it experimentally over the box, but failed to find traces of radiation, magical activity, toxins, or anything else out of the ordinary.

If Cass had been anyone except herself, she would have opened the box to see what was inside. Being Cass, however, she pulled an oblong wooden puzzle-box off a shelf in her room. Stroking around the puzzle-box, she found the hidden catch and rotated the pieces correctly to expose the interior. Satisfied with her hiding place, she slid the velvet box into the cavity and closed the box.

Damian was lying, so the meaning of the box would probably be exposed eventually. Until then, the presence of a new box in her well-kept room would cause questions. Cass did not enjoy questions, so she would keep the box and its unknown contents secret.

For now.


	5. The Search

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tim and Alfred remain sensible, and Dick is at his wits' end.

Dick tore through the entrance to the Manor about fifteen minutes after Damian had returned, slamming the door behind him viciously and startling Alfred, who dropped the rag he was using to dust a vase.

“Where the hell is Damian?”

Alfred shot Dick a mildly disapproving look as he retrieved the rag. “Master Damian returned fifteen minutes ago. I believe he is in his room, sleeping.”

Dick swore in Romani, causing Alfred to raise an eyebrow. “Look, did he give you anything? Anything at all. Did he give you something and tell you to hide it from me?”

Alfred seemed mildly confused. “No, Master Dick. Why would you think such a thing?”

Dick, who had been pacing the room furiously, stopped in his tracks, took a deep breath, clenched his fists, relaxed them, and made a running dash for the banister. “DAMIAN! Come out right now, I mean it!” he yelled as he flipped over the railing and charged up the stairs to bang on Damian’s (locked) door.

“Master Dick, you’ll wake the household,” whispered Alfred, trudging up the stairs in pursuit.

“I. Don’t. Care.” said Dick, biting off each syllable.

“What precisely did you lose? Perhaps Master Damian is innocent. Have you checked the pockets of your other coat?”

“No, I didn’t leave it in the Nightwing suit. And I can’t tell you what I lost, because it’s a secret, dammit!” He resumed his pounding.

Damian opened the door, his hair mussed and his eyes groggy. “What is the matter, Grayson?”

Dick tackled him against the doorframe. “Where did you put it! Where!”

Damian straightened himself up haughtily. “I have no idea, Grayson.”

Cass, who had poked her head out from the upper-floor landing, went back inside her room.

Alfred moved to separate the two. “Master Dick, Master Damian hasn’t seen it. He has a history test tomorrow, so I suggest that we allow him to sleep. We’ll find it in the morning.”

Dick shot Damian a _you-haven’t-gotten-away-with-this-yet_ glare and allowed himself to be corralled along the hallway to his room. Damian smirked and went back to bed.

By breakfast time three hours later, Dick was almost ready to admit defeat. He had examined and reexamined all the security footage from the Cave, but he couldn’t find any evidence that Damian had done anything while there but stow his equipment. He’d gone through Damian’s suit, cape, and utility belt, but found no trace of the ring. He had searched throughout the Manor, examining the places that he remembered from childhood as good hiding spots: the space under the squeaky beam in the back stair, the cavity behind the old dumbwaiter, the hollow tile in the fireplace, the loose stone in the back path, the inside of every clock in the house, every nook and cranny in the linen closet, the hollow centers of the busts in the attic, the empty safes behind the portraits in the second sitting room, and the false wall in the third downstairs bathroom’s medicine cabinet. Then, he’d headed outside to the old shed that had been converted for Damian’s menagerie, and searched for his ring among his brother’s animals and their various cages. Needless to say, the animals were not pleased to be disturbed, and they’d made that displeasure clear.

He texted Babs belatedly to say that he’d been held up and there should be some cornflakes in the cupboard. She texted back a picture of the fruit she’d had delivered to her door that morning.

Dick collapsed miserably into a chair at breakfast across from Tim, who was buried in his tablet.

“WE’s stock just went down half a point.”

“Good morning to you, too,” Dick said sarcastically.

“It would be a better morning if you hadn’t woken me up last night. What did Demon Brat do, anyhow?” Tim spoke rather dryly, and he didn’t glance away from his toast.

Dick mechanically ladled a heaping portion of scrambled eggs onto his plate. “Stole something.”

That made Tim look up. “What did he steal?”

“Um…I can’t tell.”

Tim raised an eyebrow. “Look, you’re talking to the world’s second-greatest detective, and the world’s greatest is upstairs sleeping off his last encounter with Catwoman. But even I can’t find an unidentified object.”

Dick sighed, slightly tempted to face-plant into his marmalade from sheer exhaustion. “An heirloom. My mom’s wedding ring. I had it with me, for—luck.”

Tim glanced around the empty room, then raised his other eyebrow. “Really? Luck? C’mon, Dick. What’re you _really_ doing with it?”

Dick breathed heavily. He had actually forgotten how ridiculously hard it was to keep secrets in this family. “Proposing.”

Tim grinned around his hashbrowns. “You are? Finally!”

Dick shushed him. “I don’t want anyone to know, okay? I want it to be a surprise.”  
“For who? Bruce? I’m pretty sure he already knows. And I think I heard Alfred telling him that it was about time already, because “ _if Master Dick and Miss Gordon continue their courtship at such a leisurely pace, I might never see any of the children married._ ” So get on with it, or you’ll disappoint _Alfred_ , because Jaybird’s next in line and I don’t think he expects any results from him, Cass, or Damian.”

“What do I do? I can’t find the damn thing anywhere. Damian took it out of my pocket and ran, and when I got back, it was gone.”

Tim chewed thoughtfully. “You could always just propose without it.”

Dick viciously speared a sausage. “It’s about the gesture, Timmy. There is no way I want to start my life with Babs off by proposing without a ring!”

“Buy a new one?”

"It’s my mom’s ring! It’s the only thing I have left of her. I even put it in a new-looking ring box so Babs wouldn’t guess, and I wanted her to have that, because it would be like my parents were there with us—I can’t _believe_ Dami would do something like this! Why would he?”

Tim smiled cryptically. “You know what you would say if I were to ever, hypothetically speaking, come to you complaining about Demonspawn, right?”

Dick laughed hollowly. “You’re always complaining about Dami.”

“You’d tell me to talk to him. And then, I would refuse, and you would go talk to him and report back to me on what was really making him mad, because the poor little delinquent is just misunderstood.”

“Dami’s not a delinquent,” Dick said automatically.

Cass came down the stairs, poured herself tea, and secured a hard-boiled egg from the sideboard. “Alright, witness interrogation. Cass, have you seen a ring anywhere? Dick’s looking for it.”

Cass shook her head, shrugging her right shoulder. “No ring.”

Tim turned around back to Dick. “See? Just ask people. You don’t even have to talk to Demon Brat if you don’t want to.”

“Damian,” corrected Dick and Cass in unison.

The day had not gotten any better later on. He’d questioned Jason (“You seriously think Demonspawn would give me that to hide from you? Just get a new ring, man. I doubt she cares about anything but your ass.”), Steph (“Oh, please. I haven’t spoken to him since the last time he called me Fatgirl. Little jerk. And I’m not fat, by the way. He’s just a brat, no matter what you say, and for the record, they’re called _curves_!”), Colin (“Sorry, but all Damian said was that he had to stop you from making a terrible mistake. I tried to talk him out of it, but he got a weird look on his face and left. Is everything okay with you two?”), Alfred (“Well of course, that is rather serious, Master Dick, but I’ll keep an eye out. May I assume that this ring is intended for the finger of a certain titian-haired lady?”), Bruce (“Sel—oh, Dick. Pull down the shades, will you? The light’s giving me a headache. No, I don’t have a hangover. Why don’t you ask Alfred about—whatever you lost.”), and Alfred again (“No, no more progress, Master Dick. I’m searching the upstairs bedrooms as I clean. Have you spoken to Master Damian yet?”).

By the time the family had collected for dinner, Dick was in a Mood. Tim had reported in (“Alfred and I agree: nothing in any of the rooms, and I even kicked Demon Brat out of his so I could check. Maybe he fed it to Titus?”), and that was discouraging. Babs hadn’t replied to his last text, and _that_ was discouraging. Even the promise of Alfred’s delectable coq au vin with twice-baked potatoes couldn’t raise his spirits from the pit they’d sunk into. He didn’t have the ring, which meant that he couldn’t marry Babs, which meant that she’d break up with him eventually and marry someone else, like Ted Kord or that Jason Bard guy, which meant that he would become depressed and probably get careless in the field, and he would therefore die extremely painfully and wouldn’t that serve Damian _right_? No, he couldn’t inflict that sort of pain on his little brother. Damian was only a kid. No, instead he would bear up under the weight of his misfortunes and learn to smile again (even if it was just a sad half-smile), and he would be a good uncle to Babs’s kids, because that was the sort of guy he was. But he would never fall in love again, not even if Kory begged him to take her back.

Wow, he sounded ridiculous.

“Alright,” he said, gazing down the table and fixing its occupants with his best imitation of the Batglare, “Damian, did you give anyone here something to hide from me? Anything at all?”

Damian swept the table with his own (much more intimidating) Batglare. “Tt.”

“Yes,” said Cass placidly, cutting into a bite of chicken.

Dick nearly choked. Tim did choke.

“Cass? But I asked, and you said you didn’t have it!” Dick wailed, feeling unaccountably betrayed.

She twirled the chicken through the wine sauce, brought it to her mouth, and chewed it slowly. “You said a ring. I had a box.”

Dick rolled his eyes, biting down on the urge to inform Cass that the ring was _in_ the box, because, knowing Cass, she would find that detail completely irrelevant. “Where is the box that Damian gave you?”

Cass inclined her head slightly towards the staircase as she took a bite of potato. “My room.”

Tim spluttered. “I already looked there!”

Cass sipped her water slowly, swishing it slightly around her mouth. “In another box.”

“Which box? You have, like, twenty,” said Dick. He’d forgotten that trying to get detailed information out of Cass was about as easy as getting Damian into bed on nights when he was benched.

Cass closed her eyes as she thought back, reaching for a slice of bread and buttering it without hitting anything or opening her eyes. “Third from the left. It unfolds like a flower—always out.”

Dick made to leave the table, but was pinned in place by Alfred’s baleful eye. He sighed heavily and tucked into his potato with renewed vigor.

Down at the end of the table, Damian was scowling.


	6. A Question and an Answer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the fluff spins out of control into angst. Sorry in advance!

Barbara Gordon was mildly surprised by the frantic knocking on her window at three-thirty in the morning. _Well, looks like I won’t be sleeping after all._ She pressed a few keys to deactivate the lock and watched with amusement as Dick fell through the window onto her living room floor. She glared at him severely, wondering why he would have completely forgotten about her the other day. It was just like Dick to run out on her, but she’d thought he’d been trying to do better.

He looked at her, embarrassment creeping across his face. “Um…hi?”

“Hi to you, too. What’s up, and why didn’t you contact me over comms?” She headed for the closet that housed her main setup, ready to find people to send out against whatever threat he’d learned of.

He trailed behind her sheepishly. “Um, I just wanted to—nothing’s up. Everything’s…fine.”

“You don’t sound it.”

He sighed and grabbed the wheel on her chair. “Babs, I’m sorry that I got held up yesterday, okay? Let’s sit down and eat something, and then we can—look, it’ll all make sense if you just let me explain…”

She sighed. Sometimes he was just so _pathetic_. “Look, I’m not mad, okay? I just have coffee with Dinah at eleven tomorrow, and she makes all sorts of jokes about us if I’m not reasonably decent…”

He kneeled down and wrapped his arms tightly around her. Barbara burrowed her head into his shirt. It was a game she played often when she was around Dick: _for the next thirty seconds, pretend that we’re always perfectly safe and there’s nothing to worry about._ “Hey, don’t worry. That’s not the end of the world. It’s how Di shows that she cares. Just make one back about her and Oliver.”

He was rubbing her back gently, and it was all she could do to pull her mind away from how safe he made her feel and how much she wanted to kiss him. “Good idea. Still, we’d probably better get some rest.”

Barbara expected him to get out from in front of her and let her wheel into their bedroom. Instead, he didn’t budge. She leaned forward and tapped his shoulder gently. “Hey, Boy Wonder. What’s eating you up?”

“I want to marry you,” he blurted, fumbling somewhere in his pocket.

It was a full thirty seconds before she could recover herself enough to respond. “What? I mean, Dick, that’s really nice, but are you sure you’re thinking this through? I mean—”

He had gripped her hand, and all she could do was stare at his fingers dumbfoundedly. “I’m not being sweet, Babs. It’s been twenty years since we met. I’m nearly thirty. I think we should make it official. I was going to ask last night, but Damian stole the ring, and he gave it to Cass, and she hid it because she didn’t know I was looking for a box…”

Her memory flashed, relinquishing the appropriate bits and pieces of the puzzle. “ _You can’t let Grayson make this commitment…Father’s responsibility to select…we are going to eat together, and talk about stuff, and probably kiss each other senseless…Why isn’t she wearing it...that scarf I got for her birthday…” Dick just up and vanished yesterday. Everyone was awkward on patrol because they knew he was about to do it…_

Her exceedingly annoying memory raced backward farther. “ _Things to tell you...I’m a man now, Batgirl...she’s asleep!...Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…wedding of Richard John Grayson and Kory Anders…Sorry, got to go, Nightwing stuff…Babs, I just can’t deal with him…I have to figure out who I want to be. You understand, right…Batgirl, wait up! How about another kiss…Nobody understands me...calm down Babs, he’s not gonna fire you…I hate you!…how is he better than me…I’m sorry I left…I love you so much…”_

“…anyway, here it is, and please, just say yes already, because you’re stressing me out right now!”

She looked back up at him, dazed. “Dick—I don’t think we’re ready for this. We haven’t been back together that long, and things generally don’t work out between us. I don’t think wearing wedding rings is gonna fix that.” He looked gut-wrenchingly hurt, and she felt a twist of guilt.

“So basically, you’re saying you won’t marry me, because I’m immature and I have commitment issues.” His tone was short and clipped, and she wanted nothing more than to make him feel better, any way she could.

“Dick, there’s a lot of reasons—” 

He laughed harshly. “Really? You’re giving me reasons. Babs, do you just think through everything logically like that? Do you just decide that all the factors and timings are conducive to being in love, or being sad, or being happy?”

She reached for his hand, but he’d drawn it away and stood up. “No, I don’t. But when it comes to something serious like this—Dick, my dad divorced his first wife, because he was _cheating_ on her. And the woman he was cheating on her with _died_ , so I’m not really interested in making any rushed decisions about this—”

“He’s not even your real dad, okay? So don’t give me that crap about wanting a stable family, because you’re just as adopted as I am! We could make anything work. I want to be married to you, and I’m willing to do anything to make that happen.”

She scoffed. “Is that what you said the last time you proposed? Because I was at that disaster you called a wedding.”

Dick recoiled defensively. “The priest was Raven, okay, a-and Raven was evil, and Kory wasn’t even that into it…look, Babs, it was complicated, okay? This would be different. It would be _right_.”

She tried to be gentle with him. “Dick, just think about this reasonably. I’m not going anywhere. And whether you go anywhere is up to you, and whether you manage to live in one country for more than a year—”

“—insert snide remark about my upbringing slash ancestry here, because of course a gypsy can’t settle down!” he spat bitterly.

“Dick, listen to me. You’re not consistent. You’re younger than me, and you’re not exactly the most mature person around. We fight a lot. I think it’s reasonable to say that we might not be each other’s best options. Besides—Dick, whatever you’re imagining married life would be like, we probably can’t measure up to that. I’m not going to retire Oracle, and somehow I don’t picture you giving up Nightwing. Before long, word gets out that Nightwing and Oracle are married, and before long, they’re using us against each other—you can’t deny that marriage is a weakness from a tactical standpoint.”

He was leaning against a wall now, eyeing her angrily. “Tactical standpoint. You know what I think is classic, Babs? That out of all the kids that Bruce has trained, the only one that he never adopted is the one that turned into him. Now for God’s sake, stop evaluating this like a string of computer code and think like a human being! Or did you mechanize that too? Do you just run everything through an algorithm to figure out the most appropriate, human thing to say? You know, you never used to be like this, Babs. You used to have fun, and laugh. And you had this fiery temper, and a better right hook than me--you were smart, and caring, and—and we were in _love_! And now, you don’t even have time for me—just that bank of computers. They’re the only thing you care about...look, you made a big dramatic role for yourself. The Oracle, locked in her ivory tower! So, does it feel good, Babs, shutting everyone out? What did you _want_ , if not to marry me? Were you just planning on breaking up with me, _this entire time_?”

She let him say his piece, restricting her outward signs of anger to a slight flare in her nostrils. “Alright, Dick, what order do you want me to answer those in?” He shrugged, not even looking at her. “Fine, then, let’s go in order of appearance. No, I didn’t turn into Bruce, Dick. But I do believe that thinking logically can help prevent problems before they occur. No, I did not mechanize my emotions. See above. Yes, I was young once. And yes, I’m a different person than I was when we met. You were eight, I was ten. Now, we’re twenty-eight and thirty. And I still have a temper, I just don’t show it, except for when people make me _angry_ by coming in here, acting entitled, refusing to see reason, insulting my dad, and being unwilling to take no for an answer! You want to know what happened to _change me_? It wasn’t the Joker, Dick: I grew up! I will always be more mature, more level-headed, and more rational than you, because that’s who I am, not because the Joker came along and stole away the true version of me and left some sick shell! And yes, I didn’t envision Oracle as someone who had a large, devoted family surrounding her! _Do you know why, Dick?_ Because when I got shot, _you weren’t there_. So _forgive me_ if I assumed I might have significant alone time in my future. And as for what I wanted from this—I kind of assumed you’d do some time here, break up with me, pack up, and _move on_! So I don’t want to marry you, because it’s dangerous for both of us, I don’t trust you to stay here, and judging by the way you just yelled at me, you _clearly_ aren’t in love with me.” Barbara sat back in her chair, tired from her outburst.

“What?” he breathed.

“I said, you aren’t in love with me. You’re in love with an idealized version of the person I used to be. _Batgirl is dead_ , Dick! Did you really expect that I’d never grow up? I have better things to do with my life than to wait for this--this _circus act_ to come to town!”

Dick strode over to her. “I love you. You. Barbara Gordon. Not Kory, not Zatanna, not Helena, not “Batgirl”, not anyone else I’ve dated. You.”

“So what?” she asked flatly.

He put his hands on the armrest of her wheelchair, boxing her in so he loomed over her. “So do you love me?”

Barbara drew back, hesitating.

“Barbara Joan Gordon. Look me in the eyes, right now, and tell me that you don’t love me. And then I will walk away and leave you to your algorithms.”

She looked away and closed her eyes.

When she looked back up, he was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The ending was way overdramatic, I know, but Dick is sappy and I couldn't resist.
> 
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> On the off-chance that people have feelings about this, so I'm heading it off at the pass.
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> In defense of Barbara: everything she said was correct. Dick is immature, and their relationship doesn't tend to work out. She's pretty much just trying to stop both of them from doing something that could break their hearts and their friendship. She sees the situation as similar to that of Jo and Laurie in Little Women. And, to be fair, Dick was getting way overdramatic at the end there, because that's just who he is. Besides, she's busy (when is she not?), and still mad that he skipped out on her the day before with little to no explanation. Not his smartest move.
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> In defense of Dick: He has major abandonment issues. Really, what he wants is a big, stable, happy, loving family, and he always assumed things were heading there with Barbara. So what's breaking his heart here is the fact that she's refusing to acknowledge that he's been trying to change. Yes, he made a lot of mistakes, but he honestly wants to move forward, and he's frustrated that she isn't ready for that. He kind of took her for granted, but he really does love her, and he sincerely believes that if they both want marriage enough, they can make it work, regardless of their pasts, obstacles posed by their double lives, etc. Everything he says is ultimately defensiveness, because, like a true Bat, he's hiding his hurt by attacking.
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> Neither of them meant to be as harsh as they were, and there's a whole host of other things they didn't even touch on. Next time, I promise that the fluff will return. (Post-breakup Dick is really funny!)
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> Sound off in the comments section: are you team Dick or team Babs??


	7. The Apology

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Damian apologizes, and has some interesting ideas about how to fix the situation.

Damian was waiting on the bed when Dick finally made it through the window of his own room. It was a clear, lovely night, one of Gotham’s rarest commodities. The stars were out in full force, and the sun wouldn’t rise for another few hours.

Dick didn’t care about any of that.

“Grayson,” said Damian.

“Move,” said Dick through gritted teeth.

“I wanted to apologize,” said Damian, sniffling slightly.

Dick’s heart melted. “Aw, Little D, it’s fine. I doubt it made much of a difference.” He sat on the bed and pulled Damian’s head into his chest. Damian made no move to escape the hug, which Dick counted as a win.

“I spoke to Father, and he said that Gordon would be his selection for your bride, even if you were to have consulted him.” Dick tried not to think about all the various ways in which that sentence hurt like _hell_.

“It doesn’t matter what Bruce thinks. She turned me down.”

Damian wriggled out of Dick’s grasp. “What? She turned you down? Gordon refused to marry you?”

He took a second and worked up the callousness to say it in full. “I asked her to marry me, and she turned me down. Let’s get some sleep, okay? We’ve got patrol tomorrow.”

Damian hopped off the bed. “You have no need to worry, Grayson. I will deal with this.”

Dick rubbed his eyes. “Deal with it how?”

“Tt,” said Damian. “Gordon and I are both creatures of logic. I will merely convince her that it is reasonable for her to accept your offer and join this family. if that fails, I don’t anticipate that she will be able to put up much physical resistance, and I plan to have her at the Manor by breakfast tomorrow. May I have your permission to tranquilize her?”

Dick blinked miserably, because he hadn’t gotten any sleep in far too long, and he _thought_ he had just heard his ninja brother offer to kidnap his ex-girlfriend so that he, Dick Grayson, could marry her. “No, you—you can’t kidnap her. It’s—it’s not right.”

Damian looked bemused. “Why?”

Dick groaned. “No, Dami. That isn’t the—hold on, are you _seriously_ telling me that League members kidnap their wives sometimes?” All of a sudden, a lot of things were making a _lot_ more sense.

“Of course,” said Damian simply. “Abduction is perfectly normal among members of the League, when more peaceful solutions fail.”

Dick sighed, running a hand through his hair. “Dami, I appreciate the gesture, but Babs— _Barbara_ —has a family. Commissioner Gordon will not want us to steal his daughter, trust me. And even if you kidnap her, she won’t change her mind about marrying me—she’ll probably even stop helping with patrol.” Sheesh. He’d suddenly realized that she might not want to help with patrol at all any more. Oracle probably had much better things to do. “So please, Dami, don’t kidnap her, okay? Just—stay out of this one. I’ll be fine, I promise.” He would be fine. He would show Babs Gordon ( _Barbara_ Gordon, he reminded himself firmly) that he was more mature than she could imagine. He would stay right here in Gotham—no more running off to Bludhaven when the going got tough—and continue patrolling, and he would show her and her obnoxiously patient smile that she meant nothing to him, nothing at all! And she would have to wonder forever whether he’d just gotten over her, or if he was hiding it. No, that wasn’t good enough. He would fall in love with somebody else, and date them for a long enough time that they wouldn’t turn him down when he asked, and then he would marry them and invite Babs ( _Barbara_ , dammit!) to the ceremony. No, he’d ask whoever-he-married to make her a bridesmaid. That would be fitting emotional torment for her.

Damian paused on his way out the door. “Would you like Titus with you tonight? I find that animal companionship can be quite comforting. And I’m sorry if my childish behavior last night led to this outcome. I just--I didn’t want to lose you to her.”

Dick felt a lump growing in his throat. “Dami, it wasn’t your fault. I said some things to her that I didn’t really mean, and she said some—other stuff.” He prepared to reject the proffered Great Dane, but decided that slobber was preferable to an injured look on his brother’s face. “I’d love to have Titus with me in here. Thanks.” Damian turned to go fetch his dog. “Oh, and Little D?”

Damian was perfectly silhouetted in the open doorway, framed by the light he’d turned on in the hallway. “Yes, Grayson?”

Dick swallowed around the lump, even though he knew from experience that it wouldn’t go away. “Even if I do get married someday, it doesn’t change the fact that you’re my little brother. I love you, and I love— _loved_ —Bab—I mean, _Barbara_. But I love you in a different way than the way I loved her--just like how I don’t love Bruce in the same way I love Jay-Jay. I just--I want you to know that I will always care about you, no matter what happens. People—people don’t just stop caring about other people because they find someone new.”

His throat was dry and sandy. Dick idly wondered if he was getting sick, and if he was, when Barbara would find out about it. Not that he cared about Barbara.

Damian nodded tightly, then left. He returned with Titus several minutes later. “C’mon, Titus, in there. Down. Good night, Grayson.”

“Good night, Little D.” But Dick knew that he wouldn’t sleep, even with the comforting pressure of Titus beside him.


	8. A Coffee and an Ambush

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Barbara vents, and Damian takes matters into his own hands.

Barbara Gordon woke up at nine in the morning, six hours after Dick left, having slept a profoundly dreamless sleep that did _not_ include any images of the misery-laden expression Dick wore in the early stages of their fight. She splashed her face vigorously with cold water, ate an apple with almond butter, did her morning stretches, took a shower, got dressed, cleaned up the bedroom, notified the police of three robberies-in-progress, remotely activated a building’s sprinkler systems to stop a fire, submitted five completed dossiers to the Justice League, and tried not to think about Dick Grayson’s face. It didn’t really work.

She left the clocktower at 10:45 and took a bus to the local coffee shop. Dinah hadn’t arrived yet, so she ordered a medium rooibos chai tea with soymilk and found a seat near the window, trying not to think about the joyful look on Dick’s face the one time she met him by accident there.

When Dinah Lance-Queen arrived, she always arrived suddenly and loudly. Today was no exception. “Babs!” she yelled from the other side of the shop, making a beeline for Barbara’s table.

“Hi, Dinah!” said Barbara enthusiastically. Maybe, if things went well, she’d have a sympathetic ear to complain to.

“So, can I see it?” whispered Dinah.

Barbara felt her stomach sink. “Um, what?”

Dinah rolled her eyes. “Your left hand, Babs. Roy spilled last week after Dick dragged him and Wally ring shopping. Said the worst part was finding out, eleven hours in, that what Dick _really_ wanted to do was use his mom’s ring.”

“I said no,” Barbara whispered to the lid of her cup.

Dinah reacted silently, shock spreading across her face. “You said no. You said no to the guy who you have practically always known is the love of your life. He is _both_ hot and rich, he knows about your night job, he worships the ground you wheel on, and you turned all of that down.” Barbara nodded. “Why?” said Dinah.

Barbara sipped her tea, feeling a little betrayed. She hadn’t wanted to explain herself to her best friend. She’d thought Dinah would understand. “It was too soon. I just felt like—like he was doing this because he was worried the Oracle thing was taking me away from him. Like he felt neglected, so he wanted me to marry him so he would have a fail-proof excuse to be needy.”

Dinah’s gaze softened a fraction. “Did you tell him that?”

Barbara bit her lip with as much violence as she could muster. “Yeah. Sort of. He said I’d turned into Bruce, you know, shutting people out, acting like a computer. _Apparently_ , he loved me more the way I was when we were younger.”

Dinah grabbed her hand. “Did you tell him about—the other thing?”

It had been long enough that she could say it without the familiar pang of regret. “That I can’t have kids? No. Damian was over a few nights back, and Dick just adores him, and—anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s over.”

Dinah leaned over the table. “It’s not over. It never is with you two.”

Barbara sighed. “It’s not something I can just bring up in casual conversation. ‘ _Nightwing, goons fifteen feet ahead. By the way, the reason I got cold feet about marrying you was that I can’t have kids, and you **clearly** want them_.’” Dinah snickered. “What?” said Barbara.

“Nothing. It’s just funny that you consider patrol chatter to be casual conversation.” She coughed something that sounded a little like "Bat."

“How about I do it over Christmas at the manor? ‘ _Good evening, Mr. Wayne. Thank you so much for having us. By the way, did you know that the reason I broke up with your son is that the Joker basically destroyed my uterus that one time?’_ ”

“Knowing him, he already knows.”

“Probably.” They sipped in silence for a while.

“So, did you get some good burns in at least?”

Barbara was momentarily stunned. “What?”

Dinah scoffed. “Oh, please. Ollie and I practically invented the angry breakup. He clearly broke your heart to bits, Babs, so I hope you got your fair share of body blows, because if you didn’t, I’m going to go give that boy a piece of my mind.”

Barbara couldn’t help but laugh at the idea of Dinah knocking on the door of Wayne Manor, storming past Alfred, barreling around Bruce, and yelling at Dick at the top of her lungs, that uncomfortable aural space between her human voice and the Canary Cry. “I told him that his last wedding was a disaster, which it was. The priest started attacking the entire congregation, and I think Kory broke up with him the instant the fight was over. Basically, most of the fight was me reiterating that he was immature and had commitment issues. I think the worst thing I said was to remind him that he wasn’t around when I got shot.”

Dinah sighed. “Low blow, but we girls have got to take what we can get. Alright, I’m satisfied. Unless you want me to go defend your wounded honor?” She paused for a response. “Yeah, I thought not. Probably not a good idea.”

Barbara pushed her chair out. “Listen, why don’t you come back to the Tower with me? We’ve basically only talked about me and my sappy romantic issues, and I want to hear all about how married life is treating you.”

Dinah smiled wickedly. “Well, I guess I can’t resist an offer that good. Besides, someone needs to protect you from the vengeful Bat-horde. Ollie’s fine. We’re thinking of adopting, but the system’s a little nervous about it, what with how high-profile all the mayor stuff is…”

Somehow, upon reaching the clocktower, neither woman was very surprised to find Damian Wayne, in costume, attempting to breach the building’s defenses from a side alley. Dinah grabbed the wriggling Robin by the hem of his cape, dangled him with his feet tantalizingly close to the ground, and stared at him. Damian didn’t flinch, the milky lenses on his glasses obscuring some of the force in his glare. Dinah didn’t blink. Their gazes remained locked in a vicious contest of stubbornness and willpower.

Barbara cleared her throat two minutes later, startling Dinah enough that she dropped Damian. Damian was so startled that he had a minor coughing fit. “Alright,” said Barbara. “Damian, what are you doing?”

He glared at her viciously. “I demand to speak to you, Gordon. Alone.”

After a lengthy confrontation (in which Dinah refused to allow Damian to be alone in a room with Barbara, Damian insisted that it was his right as the son of Bruce Wayne to have unfettered access to his father’s employees, Dinah insisted that such a right wasn’t anywhere on Barbara’s contract, and Barbara broke the argument up by agreeing to speak to Damian behind closed doors for a half hour, while Dinah waited in the living room), Barbara settled herself in the bedroom and waited to hear what Damian had to say.

“Gordon,” he opened. Clearly, he had prepared a speech.

“Wayne,” she countered.

He was mildly thrown off-balance. “You are a person of business. Let us speak plainly.”

Barbara stifled a laugh in the back of her throat. Bruce used that line all the time. She maintained her deadpan (with only moderate difficulty), inclining her head in assent. “I demand that you marry my brother.”

She forced her face to remain impassive. “And why would I do that, Wayne?”

He scowled. “My name is not Wayne. It is Damian Wayne-Al Ghul, Son of—”

“My name is Barbara Joan Gordon, but you call me Gordon all the time,” she said sweetly. “If we’re talking business like two grown-up businessmen, then I can hardly call you Damian. So Wayne it is.”

“Fine. That is acceptable. Now, you requested reasons why it would be in your interest to marry my brother immediately? Firstly, allow me to inform you that such a marriage would be highly convenient from a tactical standpoint, allowing the Family to centralize all operations in one location—”

“—thereby making us ridiculously easy to track, and getting us all killed. Next?”

Damian fumed. Or, rather, she assumed that he did, as the mask made it difficult for her to see anything at all. She wondered idly how he had gotten away with wearing it in broad daylight and decided it was better if she didn’t know. “Furthermore, I grossly underestimated my brother’s attachment to you in our previous conversation. At the moment, Grayson is not himself. In order for this family to operate effectively, he needs to be fully himself. Therefore, it is only right that you marry him in order to restore him to his natural state.”

“Wayne, I’ve seen your brother go through break-ups before. Give him two weeks, access to his break-up playlist, and a mini-freezer full of vanilla caramel-swirl ice cream. Alfred’ll know the brand to get. Your brother will pull through, just like he always does.”

Damian took a second to process this information. “Chocolate raspberry chunk.”

“What?”

“He says vanilla caramel-swirl reminds him of you,” said Damian sullenly. “Now, let us continue our discussion. You can’t be hoping for a more advantageous financial situation.”

Barbara sputtered indignantly. “I’m not. If you talked to your brother, then you would know that I didn’t say no because of the money. I don’t care about the money.”

Damian stood up from his chair and loomed over her. _He thinks he has a trump card._ A slow grin curved across his face as he jabbed a finger at her accusingly.

“Have you considered,” he began, leaning down into her face with all of his thirteen-year-old inches, “that if you fail to marry my brother, you will face severe retaliation from his friends and relatives?” His voice took on an ominous tone, booming threateningly. “Have you considered the effect on—” he paused for maximum dramatic effect “— _Pennyworth_?”

Barbara was helpless to restrain her laughter. Damian stood rather stiffly, eyeing her as if he was trying to understand why the dread name of Pennyworth had failed to produce the desired effect. “I’m not marrying your brother, Alfred or no Alfred.”

“You have not heard the last of this,” spat Damian tersely. He turned curtly on his heel and marched out past the guardian on the couch.

“So,” said Dinah lazily, “did you get what you wanted, kid?”

“Do not concern yourself with my affairs, adult!” yelled Damian as he slammed the door.

Barbara watched him through the security feeds as he pulled various elements of his Robin suit off in the stairwell, stuffing them into a school backpack that he had somehow managed to retrieve from a pocket on his utility belt. Dinah came up behind her. “Does Bruce know that his son’s a spoiled brat? Or, should I say, a spoiled Bat-brat?”

Barbara shrugged absently. “I think everybody knows. The kid tried to threaten me with the wrath of Alfred.”

Dinah cackled. “No way! What did he expect you’d say, Babs? _Oh, save me from the wrath of the mighty Alfred! I’ll marry your immature brother, if only I can be spared from less-than-impeccable table service at Christmas dinner this year! Defend me from the horrors of the burnt ham!_ ”

Barbara chuckled dryly. “I’ll give you full details. Let me just fix us a snack, okay? How does cheese and crackers sound?”

Alone in the kitchen, she gave herself thirty seconds to feel absolutely miserable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I vaguely remember reading online somewhere that Dinah was tortured in a Green Arrow comic, losing both her   
> Canary Cry and her fertility. If this isn't true, I'm really sorry, but I wanted Babs to have someone experienced to talk to about that. Unlike the rest of the Bats, she's fairly decent at sharing her problems.


	9. Raspberry Chocolate Chunk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Wally West tries to give a pep talk.

Wally left a message in the middle of the third tub of ice cream. “Dick? Hi, it’s Wally. What’s up? You haven’t texted me back. Can you pick up?” A long pause. “Alright, then. Hard way it is.”

Two minutes later, he heard the sound of knocking at the front door. “Hey, Alfie! Is Dick home? No, don’t answer that, or you’ll have to lie. I’m going in.”

Dick checked the lock on his door and turned his breakup playlist louder. Wally hammered at the door. “Dick! Lemme in, dude! Seriously, not cool!” There was a pause. “Do any of you Batkids know how to pick a lock?”

Tim’s voice. “Yeah, I do. Hi, KF. I doubt you’ll have much luck with him, but you’re welcome to try.”

Dick hid the freezer and dove under the covers. He did _not_ want Wally to eat all the ice cream, even if chocolate raspberry chunk was a poor substitute for vanilla caramel swirl.

Wally poked his head in three minutes later. Dick heard his footsteps make their way toward the bed, and then he felt himself being roughly sat on as Wally reached for the speakers and turned off the music. “I know you’re there,” said Wally.

“Mmph,” said Dick. Wally sighed and pulled the blankets off Dick.

“You know, Dick, you’re acting really ridiculous right now. Like, if I didn’t know way, _way_ better, I’d think you’d been mind-controlled or something. Judging by the lack of reply to my texts, she broke up with you. So what? You do realize that our teammates would totally be laughing their heads off at you, right?”

Dick made no response. Wally pulled him up from the pillow, graciously scooting off of his legs. “I appreciate you thinking of me, Wally, but I’d rather be left alone.”

Wally laughed. “Yeah, I’m getting that vibe off you right now. But if you don’t fix this, fast, I’m going to send some photos to that ex-Titans group chat. Trust me, you don’t want people to see you like this.” Dick sighed mechanically. Wally snorted. “Look, this isn’t you. This isn’t Dick, this isn’t Rob, and it certainly isn’t Nightwing. So spill.”

“She thinks I’m immature.”

Wally laughed. Dick scowled. “What?” said Wally. “You have to admit that the girl’s got a point. You are _startlingly_ immature in some ways. But look on the bright side of that. Don’t call it immature: call it _being optimistic_. Or “ _viewing the world with fresh eyes_.” You are _also_ one of the best leaders I know, so give yourself a break.”

Dick groaned. “I feel awful.”

Wally clucked sympathetically. “Probably the ice cream. It’s not good for you. Can I have some?” Without waiting for a response, he extracted the freezer from underneath Dick’s bed and pulled out a tub. Dick, who had expected something like this when Wally started texting, handed him a spoon. “Thanks. Anyway, there’s no way she just broke up with you because you’re immature. Babs knows you’re immature.”

Dick sighed. “She won’t marry me because I’m immature. But it was fairly amicable until I flew off the handle at her. Now, she thinks I’m in love with an idealized version of her past self. She also thinks that me liking her is a passing thing.”

Wally whistled. “Okay, one step at a time. Procedure is the essence of the scientific method. Step one: Clean yourself up. You look like hell. Step two: Calm yourself down and stop thinking about her so much. Step three: Go hit some goons tonight, because I promise that you’ll feel better afterwards.”

Dick flopped down on his stomach. “How many steps are there?”

Wally held up a finger. “Don’t break my concentration, or I’ll forget where I was. Step three was hit goons. Okay, step four—mmm, this is really good ice cream—is give her a few weeks to cool off. Step five is to make some efforts to casually run into her…”

Dick rolled over onto his side and tuned Wally out. Eventually, the speedster realized that his friend wasn’t listening. “Okay, fine. You do you. You’re practically a girl magnet, so you’ll be fine. Just—try and figure out why you like her, okay? And then go from there. I’ll see you around, anyway. I’d stay, but my mom needs me. Big party, lots of annoying people. Got to go. I’m probably late, and it’d be nice if people would stop making jokes about me taking after Uncle Barry that way.’

Dick grunted. Wally smiled wanly and left.


	10. Patrol

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which everyone tries to buckle down and get some actual work done.

Barbara was slightly nervous to get on the line with Dick’s family, but Dinah insisted. “It isn’t crime-fighting without Oracle. Trust me on this. You’re not mad at them, so don’t punish them. And if they’re mad at you, they’re just idiots.”

So she’d hooked up her headset and was waiting for the comm-in signals.

Jason, surprisingly, was the first to turn on his comm set. “Evening, Barbie.”

“Hood,” she greeted, as warmly as the voice-scramblers would allow. “Nice to hear from you. I was beginning to think you’d left town for good.”

He scoffed. “Not a chance. Hey, Barb, did you dump Golden Boy because you were waiting for another, more ruffianly guy? Because I’m still single, and I’m told I’m _very_ mature for my age.”

She smiled. “Thanks but no thanks, ruffianly isn’t a word, and B will maim you if he catches you using names.”

He laughed. “Well, guess I’ll try my luck another day, then. Where do you need me?”

“Depends on who’s out tonight. I only have you and Canary so far. Are the others out and just not on comms?”

He puffed out a breath. “You know as much as I do. They don’t exactly ask me over to dinner nightly. Well, they ask me every Sunday, but I don’t like going. Anyway, your guess is as good as mine. Where to?”

She pulled up a map. “Alright, looks like we have a minor break-in in progress. Ninth and Ash. Comm for backup if you need anything, and send me any data you get.”

“You sure you don’t just wanna hang out?” he drawled.

“Sorry, don’t think I can. But I have a software monitoring for close-range gunshot noises on your line, so don’t try anything.’

“Love you too, Barbie,” he muttered sarcastically.

Steph commed in a few minutes later. “Hey O. Sorry for the holdup. Big line at the waffle house. I’m about a block from the edge of my zone. What’s going on?”

Barbara directed Steph to the scene of what appeared to be a drug deal and signed off, waiting for the next line of comm signals.

It was three in the morning when Batman, Robin, Black Bat, Red Robin, and Nightwing all commed in simultaneously. She considered asking them why they were so late, just to see if any of them were embarrassed.

Cass seemed normal, and even ventured a timid “Sorry about my brother.”

Damian was cold, and said nothing to her beyond “Tt.”

Bruce was hard to read, but seemed stiffly polite. He even thanked her for the information when she tipped him off about a break-in at the Botanical Gardens.

Tim was clearly flustered, and explained at great, almost stammering length, that they’d been out for a while, but Nightwing had blocked their comm signals, and it had taken them a very long time to convince him to lower the block.

She’d forgotten that Dick liked hacking.

Barbara was not in a good mood when she flipped to Dick’s channel. She briefly considered switching the scrambler off as she usually did on his line, but she decided not to. It was more secure, and there was no reason to accord him special treatment.

“Nightwing. Nice to hear that you’re still in the hacking game. I have a break-in at Third and Smith. It’s some sort of government laboratory. Listen, you’re going to want to be careful, because the methodology looks—”

The line went to static. Barbara checked her connection and tried again. “Nightwing. Nightwing, do you copy? Oracle to Nightwing, copy?” She ran a tracking program, but came up without a signal.

She deliberated for a moment as to which operative she should call. Dinah had gone back to her hotel, since she had an early flight to catch. Jason was unreliable, and didn’t like Dick much. Damian was angry at her, Steph was not quite capable enough to venture a solo rescue operation, Bruce hated being sidetracked, and Cass was difficult to communicate information to. She decided on Tim, who was capable, not that upset at her, and also the closest to Dick’s last location.

“Red Robin, this is Oracle. Nightwing has disabled all his devices. I’m sending you coordinates from his last location. He’s probably fine, but I think you should check it out, since the target is a government neuroscience laboratory.”

“Scarecrow.” Tim made the connection instantly.

“That was my thought too. Crane’s out of Arkham since June, as far as I can see, and he hasn’t popped up since a few months back. I thought a connection was fairly unlikely because government buildings are a little out of his MO, but I have the experiment logs up right now and they’re all reporting changes to the environment surrounding the samples, changes consistent with—”

“Fear gas,” Tim supplied. “Alright, I can make it in two minutes if you don’t mind me driving on the sidewalk.”

“Go ahead. I’ll deal with the traffic footage.”

She called the incident in to Bruce as well, but told him that Tim was taking care of it and she’d let him know if additional backup was needed.

“No need. I’ll go.”

Barbara frowned. “Negative, Batman, I have three crimes-in-progress in your territory, one of which looks like it might involve Ivy. You’re the one paying me to tell you what to do, though, so feel free to ignore me and my convenient crime-tracking algorithms. Red’s closer to the 20 on Wing’s last tracking ping, and I need you to cover half of Red’s territory. I’m assigning Black Bat and Batgirl to the other half. “

Bruce grunted an affirmative.

She updated Cass and Steph on the situation before switching back over to Tim’s channel.

“Double-R? This is Oracle calling Red Robin. Do you copy?”

Tim’s voice came through. He was speaking quickly and jerkily as though he was out of breath. “Yeah, I copy, Oracle. I need medical evac at the location I’m sending right now. I fought my way through to ‘Wing, but he’s definitely been gassed. Antidote is taking effect, but I count two bruised ribs, possibly one broken. He took a bad beating, and I spot some sort of chemical burn on his legs. We’re on the fifth floor, and the jarring from the grapple-down could aggravate his injuries.”

“Copy, Red Robin. Any active threats in your location?”

A pause. “I neutralized floors two through five, but there’s significant overhead activity.”

She pulled up the building schematics. “Alright, Red. Can you carry him?”

“Affirmative.”

She zoomed in on the schematics. “Double-R, I need you to get a window open on the west side for entry units. When you’re done, there should be a hallway to your right. The back stairwell is three doors down on the left, unmarked. Take that down to the first floor. Leave anything you can’t carry and another operative will pick it up. Exit the back stairwell, and the attached hallway, go right and pass five doors on your left. The sixth one is a storage closet. There should be enough room for the two of you, and possibly a decent first-aid kit. Stay there, lock yourself in, treat him as best you can, and I’ll comm you when backup arrives.”

“Affirmative.” Barbara watched Tim’s tracker to make sure he was going the right way as she pulled up an open line. “All operatives, Red Robin and Nightwing need backup and medical evac. All available units, prepare to proceed to the location I’m sending. _Only_ proceed if all immediate situations in your area are neutralized. Home station, prep an area for medical work, injury count is two ribs bruised, possibly one broken, and some type of chemical burn on the legs. No gunshot wounds, possible blunt trauma. Fear gassed, but received timely antidote delivery. Possibility of concussion. All available units, comm in on private lines for individual assignments. Oracle out.”

Bruce commed in immediately. “Oracle, do you copy?”

“Copy, B. I need you to enter at the fifth floor. There’s an open window on the west side of the building. It opens on the main laboratory area, which should be neutralized. The main stairwell is located on the North side of the building. It’s plainly marked. I need you to take it up and neutralize all successive floors. I’ll send you more backup shortly. Oh, and pick up Red Robin’s gear, will you? He had to ditch it to carry Wing.”

“Copy,” growled Bruce. He plainly would have preferred to extract Tim and Dick, but he knew that he was the most likely to be able to neutralize the top ten floors of the building. She sent Steph to evacuate Dick, telling her to comm when she was close to their location. Cass commed in next, and Barbara sent her to the roof of the building with orders to work her way down until she met up with Bruce.

Damian commed in shortly after Cass. “Oracle, this is Robin. I’ve covered all situations in my area. What’s Nightwing’s condition?”

She sighed. “No updates, Robin. I need you to reinforce Black Bat. Proceed to the roof of the building, where she should have left you a door open. Clear the floors successively until you meet up with Batman. I’ll have home base update you on Nightwing’s condition.”

“Tt,” said Robin. “My apologies for the earlier disturbance, Oracle.”

“No need. Red filled me in.”

“I meant earlier.” He actually did sound repentant for once. “I have been informed that it was not my place to interfere, as it would have been more appropriate for such a discussion to happen with Nightwing present and all others absent.”

She sighed. “Don’t worry about it. Oracle out.”

Steph commed in briefly with news that she was within range of Tim and Dick. Barbara thanked her and called Tim’s earpiece.

“Red Robin, this is Oracle. Do you copy?”

“Copy, Oracle. Evac’s near?”

“Yep. Expect Batgirl with a car, ETA one minute. Unlock the door, and I’ll direct her to your location.”

“Copy, Oracle. Nightwing’s condition is stable, for the moment. Tell home base that I haven’t identified the source of the burn yet, but it’s not causing any further damage. My best bet is some sort of concentrated base. Definitely not acidic.”

She directed Steph to the storage closet, called Alfred with the additional information, checked in on the fighting units, received confirmation that Steph and Tim had made it back safely, got the all-clear on the upstairs floor from Bruce, called in the crime to GCPD, and waited for news on Dick’s condition.

It was nine AM by the time anyone thought to call her. Unsurprisingly, the person who thought to call her was Tim, who left a message on her answering machine.

“Hey, Barb. Listen, I don’t think anyone got back to you last night.”

She picked up. “Hi, Tim. Is your brother alright?”

“Healing up fine, and he’s well enough to complain to Alfred about how much the bandage itches. Listen, Bruce wanted me to check something with you.”

“Yeah, what can I do?”

“Can you do me a favor and see what happened to his earpiece? We thought he disconnected it, but we can’t find it.”

She pulled over a monitor. “Yeah, let me check. Have you asked him?”

He snorted. “Bruce is raking him over the coals right—hang on, here he is. Bruce, I’ve got Barbara on the line.”

There was a small silence, as Tim passed the phone to Bruce. “Barbara, I need you to come stay at the Manor for a few days.”

“Why?”

Bruce practically growled. “Dick dropped his co—phone,” he hastily amended.

“No need for secrecy; this is a very secure line.”

He paused. “Barbara, you’re wanted by more people than most members of this family put together. If the right person picks that earpiece up, they could blow the entire Oracle operation sky-high. At the very least, that tech could most likely give your location away, correct?”

“Negative, Bruce,” she responded dismissively. “NSA won’t crack that encryption. Nobody can. The whole thing is safe, I promise. The government can barely get into an iPhone.”

“Nevertheless, I would appreciate if you would do as I say. Pack up your whole enterprise and come to the Manor. If there’s no movement within a week, then we’ll assume that everything’s fine. I’ll see if I can get your father to let me swipe it from evidence lockup in the meantime.”

She leaned her head back against the wheelchair and sighed. “Fine. But five days, only. After that, I’m gone.”

“Done,” said Bruce. “How portable is your setup?”

She sighed. “Not portable for me, and probably incriminating.”

“Alright. Anything that a normal person would possess can go. The rest, decide whether it’s irreplaceable or not. Can you destroy the things on your own?”

She groaned at the thought. “No, I can’t. Anything I can do here leaves way too much evidence.”

He deliberated for a second. “Alright, we’ll take it all. Box it up as best as you can and I’ll send someone for it. Who would you like to pick you up?”

 _Right, because normally he would send Dick, because I dated him and he kind of turned into “Bat-Family-Liaison-to-Oracle”._ “Honestly, it doesn’t matter. Just send whoever’s free; I’m not picky.”

Cass pulled up in a black Beetle half an hour later, with Jason in the backseat. Barbara watched from the window as he wrestled her to get to the horn, which he honked vigorously.

Barbara unlocked the door for them and watched as Jason tried to needle Cass into racing him up. She gave herself forty-five seconds to prepare before wheeling out of the bedroom to greet them. “Hi, guys!”

Jason was surveying the vast heap of boxes incredulously. “Jeez, Cassie, aren’t you glad you brought me along to do the heavy lifting?” Something in his tone rang slightly false.

Cass shrugged slightly. “Bruce said to keep you out of trouble. I can lift heavy things.”

Jason rolled his eyes exaggeratedly, smirking at Barbara. “Ray of sunshine, isn’t she? How have you been, Barbie? Heartbreak aside, of course.”

Barbara smiled. “I’m doing well, Jason. I thought you were living on your own these days.”

Jason sighed dramatically. “Bruce called me last night with the news about Golden Boy. Said he wanted the family all in one place. I said no, of course, but then he sent Demon Brat and Replacement to get me. So I took them down and delivered them back, but it turned out they’d injected a bomb into my neck during the fight. I’m here being held hostage, and if I step a toe out of line, even if I say just one bad word…Alfred will detonate the bomb.”

Cass was hefting a box experimentally. “He heard about Dick being hurt. Said he would help. He likes being big brother, and Dick is asleep. Alfred let him in. He hates that I do not like his jokes.”

Barbara laughed. “How’s Dick?”

“He asked for you just before he slipped into the coma. He said to tell you never to let the bastards drag you down, because you were the love of his life—no, hold on, that’s what he said to tell Kory. To you, he said that he missed your smile, and the way that you would scrunch your nose up when you were trying to think of palind—no, wait up, that’s Zatanna. Um, he said that you should go fuck off,” Jason finished maliciously.

Cass had three boxes in her arms, and she was halfway down the front stairs. “You were right about the ribs. The burn is minor. He didn’t mention you.”

Jason grimaced after her retreating form, picking up the three largest boxes and heading for the elevator. “Does she know you have an elevator?”

“Yes. I think she just wanted to get away from you for as long as possible.”

“You’re breaking my heart, Barb,” Jason responded dryly as the doors closed on him.

Cass reappeared several minutes later, followed by Jason. “So, how upset is Bruce?” asked Barbara as they piled up new armfuls of boxes.

Jason made a face. “He’s gone Bat-shit crazy. Yelled at Goldie for a solid half-hour, benched him for the week. Then Alfred kicked him out so that Golden Boy could get some beauty sleep, and he started pacing all over and getting in random screaming fights with people.”

Barbara looked at Cass expectantly. Cass shrugged. “Jason is right.”


	11. Huck and Mary Jane

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jason Todd's perceptions of reality are skewed, but interesting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I've been getting a lot of comments asking why Babs feels insecure about not being able to have kids, since both she and Dick are adopted, and I thought I'd clear that up. First of all, that's not the reason she broke up with him. She broke up with him for the precise reasons she described. 
> 
> However, having been Dick's friend for years, she's aware that Dick's relationship with Bruce was frequently stormy, and she doesn't want him to go through that with an adoptive son of his own. Furthermore, being practical, Babs is realizing that it would be extremely tricky to balance the adoption process with their night jobs (due to the monitoring required to ensure the home is stable, safe, etc.) I don't know much about the adoption process from personal experience, but my cousin was adopted, and his moms almost lost him when his biological grandmother sued for custody. So Babs is also realizing that adoption isn't always guaranteed to be permanent, and that losing a custody battle could break Dick's heart. Finally, it's also a personal issue in terms of her own self-esteem. Having spent years trying to convince herself that the Joker's attack will not prevent her from having the life that she wants, it's hard for her to be comfortable with any evidence to the contrary. When Babs sees how much Dick loves Damian, she can only imagine how much he could love a child of his own.
> 
> Hope this clears things up! Now, let's all read some Jason Todd angst!

Jason Todd hated Dick Grayson.

It was a fact that inexorably separated him from the rest of humanity. He, Jason Todd, was the only person alive (that he was aware of) who hated Dick Grayson.

There were a thousand reasons why Jason hated Dick. First of all, Dick was just plain _irritating_. He was obnoxious, and annoying, and nothing he did ever seemed real. You never knew where you were with him, because he was always showing off or _performing_. He tried to wrap the entire world up in his vision of a happy family, and then he got angry when the world didn’t want to conform.

Then, there was the fact that Dick was supposed to be Jason’s role model when they were younger, and nothing Jason did could measure up to Dick’s legacy. There was the fact that every one of Dick’s wrongdoings was always instantly forgiven by everyone around him. Dick was the only person Jason knew who could pull off the double act of being a total fuck-up and a goody-two-shoes. There was even the fact that Dick had somehow conceived the notion of green scaly short-shorts, thereby making several years of Jason’s existence into sartorial hell.

And then, there was Barbara Gordon, who was a walking representation of every reason why Jason Todd hated Dick Grayson. 

Barbara Gordon had been Jason’s first-ever crush. He had adored her—hell, he had worshipped her. Sometimes, it felt like she was the only person in the entire sprawling family of bat-themed vigilantes who gave a crap about him. Other times, it felt like she was the only person he’d ever met who understood him.

Okay, that wasn’t true. Roy and Kory understood him, and they saw far more of him than Barbara ever did, could, or would. But the fact remained that he sometimes felt like that.

It had always been like that, ever since the first day he met her. Bruce had hired her to tutor him in academics after his grades dipped below passing from all the days of school he skipped. He’d knocked on her door, rather apprehensively. Alfred had said she was a librarian, and he’d expected someone old, severe, and buttoned-up. Barbara had been warm, with an elusive smile like a dancing flame.

 _Jason Todd, closet romantic._ He knew he was sappy, but that was just how she made him feel sometimes. And if Roy or Kory ever called him on it, well, he’d show them that he _definitely_ wasn’t going soft.

She’d had cookies out for him, and she’d laid out a “pretest” for him in history, which was his worst subject. He’d grumbled, but she’d egged him on through it with funny and exciting stories about the people involved (and boy, had it worked: to this day he remembered the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by the way Barbara had grinned wickedly when she explained that Sybil Ludington was the one who had actually made the famous ride successfully, but she didn’t get credit for it because her name didn’t rhyme with anything.) And at the end of the session, she’d invited him upstairs to her bookshelf and helped him pick out books to borrow. She didn’t ever make him read classics, or tell him that something was above his reading level.

He’d asked her, on his way out the front door, if she’d done this with the other boy. He hadn’t dared use Dick’s name back then: it was too sacred for the likes of him. Her face had gone slightly sad for a second, like a statue in a church. “No, I didn’t do this with Dick. He wouldn’t have been able to sit still long enough.”

Jason wasn’t an idiot, and his mentor was supposedly the World’s Greatest Detective. So he’d made it a personal mission to find out what had happened to make Barbara Gordon sad at the very mention of Dick Grayson. It was Alfred who had given him the story. “Master Dick and Miss Barbara…ah, stepped out. Or, used to. They ended the relationship shortly before he relocated to San Francisco.”

And then the next week, Batgirl had been in the sky alongside him, and he’d recognized Barbara immediately. She fought in the same way that she tutored: with wit, energy, and a dazzling brilliance. In his next tutoring session, he noticed a wistful look on her face as she read Henry IV (there was a prince named Hotspur who was going off to war, and his wife was begging him to tell her his secret plans because she hated seeing him wake up with nightmares, and he had become emotionally distant, and he didn’t trust her, but he was pretending that everything was alright. She hated being tossed aside when the men went to war, because she was strong and could deal with reality just as effectively as him, and _fuck_ , wasn’t that the relationship between Dick and Barbie in a nutshell, _especially_ the part where Hotspur told his wife to go home and wait for him to return for her). Jason realized then, with a startling clarity of thought, that he hated Dick Grayson.

When he’d met Dick, he’d been mildly underwhelmed. This was Bruce’s legendary protégé, the Robin to end all Robins. This was Alfred’s beloved Master Dick, the child who could do no wrong. This was the man who Barbara had fallen in love with, the man she had waited for over three long years. But all Jason saw was an insecure boy, barely older than himself, who spent a day at the Manor yelling vigorously at Bruce, while professing an insincere desire to be “a good brother” to Jason. He hadn’t believed Dick, not one bit.

Jason had visited Barbara the day after Dick left. She’d been sitting by a window, upstairs, and she hadn’t turned around when he came in. He couldn’t remember the exact details of their conversation (he blamed the Lazarus Pit for that), but he knew that she’d told him everything. She hadn’t said much, but he knew Barbara. She’d said enough for him to guess the rest. Dick Grayson had broken her heart, left her waiting for him, then come back just long enough to make her feel guilty. Guilty for not going with him, for picking Bruce over him, for not helping him and being there for him when he needed it.

She’d gotten in an argument with Bruce that week. He hadn’t been supposed to hear, but he’d heard anyway. Barb had always been one of the only people who could tell Bruce off. She didn’t do it often, but when she did, it was important. She’d told him that he was trying to turn Jason into Dick, instead of trying to get to know Jason as he was. “You have to meet him halfway, Bruce.”

They’d read Huckleberry Finn together, and for the rest of his life, he’d seen her as the Mary Jane to his Huck. “ _She had the most sand of any girl._ ” Barbara had wheelbarrows full of sand, more sand than anyone else Jason had ever known, woman or man. The association was probably helped by the fact that she, like Mary Jane, was red-headed and older than him.

It was several weeks before he died (and several months before she got shot) when they had a conversation that he would always remember. They’d been talking about the death of George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party. He’d wondered at the time if she’d picked the topic because she’d heard about his most recent outburst. She’d asked him what he thought of the assassination. He’d replied, in no uncertain terms, that Rockwell was a bastard and deserved what was coming to him. Jason had turned the question on her, then. He’d always had a sense that she didn’t share Bruce’s opinions of killing—after all, her father had taken lives.

She’d twisted her hair around a finger meditatively, and he remembered wanting to reach out and touch it. The words were blurry in his mind, but he knew what he’d gotten out of it. If it came down to her, a monster, a weapon that she controlled, a life that could be saved if she acted, and no other way out, she would kill. But only if there were civilians or allies at risk. _Not for me,_ her eyes said. _I would not kill to save my life._ He wondered whether she’d always had that low opinion of her worth, or whether Dick Grayson had given it to her by leaving her.

Barbara had retired, eventually. She’d explained it by referring to Peter Pan. “Children must grow up, Jace. I can’t be Batgirl any longer.” And then he’d died, and he hadn’t remembered anything for a long time. When he returned to Gotham, he hadn’t thought about trying to find her. He’d been blinded by the Lazarus Pit, wrestling laughing faces that dragged him down to drown in his own blood.

When the haze cleared, he’d finally been able to sit back and realize that he’d revealed himself to Bruce, killed nearly fifty people, and somehow managed to take over the entirety of organized crime in Gotham. He’d gone under for a month and a half, long enough that the crime systems would reorganize and the Bats would stop expecting to find him.

He’d been in an alleyway, early in the morning, surrounded by the sort of fog that swirled in lazy white tendrils on snowy days. But there hadn’t been any snow, and the ground was unforgiving when he had fallen, tangling with the legs of a man who smelled like marijuana and excrement. He’d found the man threatening a little boy with a knife. When he’d stood up, there had been a neat hole in the man’s head, and the boy had been crying in a corner. He’d walked away without a backward glance, because he didn’t need to see the kid throw up.

The bat had appeared out of the mist, silent and unearthly. She (it was a girl bat) had dropped a card on the ground, looked directly at him, and enunciated slowly and clearly, as if it was a struggle, “Jason.”

The card had a number on it, with the words, “Ask for Oracle.”

Of course he’d heard of Oracle. It was the name that people cursed, with disgust and terror, as they watched him come for them. Whether the operative was a human trafficker or a drugrunner, they’d all look at him, petrified. “You work for her, don’t you?” The first time someone said that, he’d paused, confused, and they’d elaborated. “Oracle.” And he’d nearly killed someone once, a young woman who had faced him sardonically as he held the gun at her. “Oh, please. Spare me the BS. I’m here for Oracle.” Jason had leaped at her wildly.

“Who is Oracle?” Oracle, who was always one step ahead of him. “Who is she? What is she even doing, anyway?” The woman had looked at him with distaste. “Oh. My mistake. I thought with the whole mask thing, you were in-network. Never mind.” She’d disarmed him airily, and leaped out the window, long blonde hair streaming.

He’d called several days later. The computerized voice that answered had reminded him of the voice in the iPhone commercials. The conversation had been brief. Oracle (who wasn’t a bat, even though her apprentice apparently was) had money and information, but needed an operative. He wanted money and information, and he was an operative.

It had been several months before he’d learned anything about his employer. He’d been on his third or fourth assignment, undercover in a human trafficking ring. When it came down to it, Jason didn’t like being in charge. He could have been a king, but he wouldn’t have known what to do with a kingdom.

Oracle’s only connection to him on the op was through an earpiece. He had gone into an interview for a promotion in the ranks, but his cover had been blown, and he was trying to fight his way out. His vision had blurred up like it always did when he was in trouble, and he was shooting wildly at any target that presented itself.

Oracle’s voice had intruded on the edge of his consciousness. “Hood, I need you to focus. You’re too close to the victims to open fire wildly.” She must have heard his panting through the line and realized that something was off. “Hood, what’s the Quadratic Formula?”

He hadn’t understood why she needed to know, but there was an echo of Batman in Oracle’s voice that he had always obeyed without question. “Negative B plus or minus the square root of B squared minus four AC, all over two A.”

The goons in the hallway stared at him. He glared back, opening fire with improved aim.  
“Careful. We need some of them alive to testify. Otherwise, the money behind this gets off clean. Who killed Macbeth?”

“Macduff,” he said, restricting his fire to the ones he knew were lower-level.

It was only later that he dimly realized that Oracle had somehow known what sort of things he would know. But he paid very little attention to that, since he had gotten used to Oracle knowing everything.

She had contacted him the next week with an address, but Jason had expected a dead drop, not the top floor of a cute uptown apartment building. He’d taken the elevator up, feeling glad he’d worn civilian clothes. The bat had opened the door and let him in, before silently vanishing. Jason had walked along the hallway and knocked on the door at the end. “Come in,” a female voice had said.

He’d only seen the back of her at first: red ponytail and a wheelchair. And then she’d turned around, and he’d recognized her by the shape of her chin and the blue in her eyes and the curve of her smile. “Jason. Do you remember me? It’s been a long time. I read 6’2” in your files, but it’s kind of a shock to see it in person. I remember you at about 5’3”.” She held up a hand at about 4'1", but he supposed she wouldn't be able to reach 5'3", so he let it slide.

“Barbara. Of course I remember.” He tried to think of a joke, but failed. Ever since he woke up from the Pit, jokes had been his defense mechanism of choice. Like the name Red Hood, it was his own small way of taking his death back. And then the words came unbidden to his tongue. “What happened?”

When she’d told him, he’d remembered what she’d said, about a weapon and a monster. He hadn’t asked why she didn’t go for the gun, and she hadn’t answered. But he’d known that her reaction time was just as good as Bruce’s. If Barbara had cared for the value of her life, she would still be walking. But she’d tried to figure out whether her life was worth the lives of the Joker and his henchmen, and the identities of herself and her friends, and in that moment of indecision, the bullet had torn through her spine. Where everyone else had read bad luck, he’d seen the choice she made.

She had hired him as an operative on a permanent basis. “All my friends are women, and that doesn’t work in some ops. Besides, if you want to do good in Gotham, it’s me or Bruce,” she’d admitted candidly. 

She’d schooled him in the modern era: how to use an iPhone, what he’d missed in pop-culture, what had happened politically, what the best TV shows were nowadays. She’d helped him find an apartment, she’d helped him find furniture for it, she’d set him up a bank account, she’d sent a bat (the blonde one he’d nearly killed, who turned out to be called Steph) to help him buy some clothes. (“I’d do it myself,” she’d said, laughing, “but everyone I know says I’m hopeless. Apparently, I don’t know how to properly match my brands. There’s whole layers to it beyond what looks good.”) She’d sat in the kitchen of his apartment and taught him the rudiments of how to cook, how to sculpt, how to paint. (“I think part of what’s bothering you is sensory overstimulation, combined with your past ADHD. Basically, you need to keep your hands busy, all the time. If you keep yourself distracted, you should stay pretty much under control--no more itching for a trigger, hopefully. I got you some putty that you can use. Basically, you just squeeze it. I got the kind where it changes colors with body heat, so it should be fun.”)

When the nightmares became more than he could stomach, he’d gone to her, at two in the morning, just before the bats generally turned in for the night. She’d taken one look at his face, told Bruce she’d call him back, and wheeled over to him. If he’d been Dick Grayson, he might have collapsed dramatically into her lap, but he’d steadied himself on the windowsill and told her about drowning in the Pit. He told her about Talia and what she did to him. He told her about the faces that paraded past his wakeful gaze like Banquo’s descendants.

Babes had listened, comforted him, confronted him (“what Talia did isn’t on you, Jace. She used you. And if you ever doubt that again, come back, and I will tell you again. You are not weak, Jason Todd. You’re _telling_ me, which makes you a hell of a lot stronger than most of the people I work with.”), and ordered him a weighted blanket. He’d protested that weighting the blanket would make it feel more like he was drowning (“Barbie, please tell me this isn’t part of a nefarious plot to drive me back to B. Is Alfred hiding under the bed? Oh no, Demon Brat’s waiting in the wardrobe! You betrayed me!”). She’d insisted that he try it once (“seriously, Jason Todd, cut it out right now, Dami’s not in the wardrobe, and literally nobody could fit in my fridge! Dick's not in the fridge, Jace, I mean it! Get off me!! Anyway, the weight of the blanket is going to stop you from tossing and turning so much.”) Of course, she had been right. Barb was always right.

It was Barbara who had first persuaded him to attend one of the famous holiday Bat-family dinners. “You’re better now, Jason. You have control. You don’t have to agree with them—anyone knows that I don’t—but it’s certainly easier to get things done if you work with them.” While he was there, he’d had to watch as she hashed out an argument with Dick Grayson. They hadn’t been speaking recently, she had told Jason the week before when he’d asked. But somehow, they ended the night by kissing under the mistletoe. He’d implied when he drove her home that Dick didn’t deserve her. “He makes me happy when I’m around him, Jace,” she’d said. But what he’d heard was _“I need to be with him while he’s here, because I don’t know how long he’ll stay.”_

He’d toyed, briefly, with the notion of killing Dick. But it wouldn’t have done anyone any good, even her, and it would probably result in an extended stay in Arkham. He’d considered leaning over to Barbara and kissing her, just once. But he knew she had escrima sticks hidden in her wheelchair, and she would probably kick his ass halfway to Sunday before he even managed to get his tongue involved.

Eventually, he’d started hanging out with the bats. They weren’t as bad as he remembered. Demon-brat was almost kind of endearing, and Replacement was both bland enough to ignore and smart enough to be helpful. Goldie... _well_ , he made a lot of _sense_ , and eventually Jason could stand him enough to deal with him. He was so needy, but it was because he’d always had a loving, reasonably supportive family. He wanted Jason in the family, because he was used to people liking him and wanting to be around him. The reason Dick didn’t get that Jason had seen through his bullshit was that he hadn’t yet seen through it himself.

Sitting next to Barbara on the ride back, engaging her in a hilariously inane conversation about the fact that Alfred was making a blueberry pie for her, Jason wanted nothing more than to pin her to the seat of the car and shout at her. Something like, “ _You have to stay away from him! Do you know what you’re doing to yourself? You are independent, and smart, and he doesn’t see you as worth sticking around for! It’s all going to play out the same way, and he’ll feel_ sorry _and extend a hand, and you’ll come dancing back to him like you always do! Except, it won’t play out the same this time, because **I won’t let it.** I won’t let him have you, because he doesn’t understand that you love Shakespeare’s history plays and the Aeneid, but you didn't see Henry V for years after the attack because you hated the gunshot noises that those dumb modern-redesign productions kept putting in there. Dick won’t ever see why there’s so much beauty in the Periodic Table, because it’s all designed with the orbital shells in mind. He doesn’t know that you would order a kill on someone who deserved it. He doesn’t know that you love the way that the Supreme Court decision in Marbury v. Madison established the ability of the Supreme Court to determine what laws were constitutional by making it so that Jefferson would have to give up the victory in the case if he wanted to get rid of it. All he knows is that you love the way he smirks at you when he’s come back from a long journey. _ All he knows _is that you come back to him when he asks. But you won’t, not this time, because **I will stop you.** ”_

She must have noticed him looking at her, because she smiled hugely at him. “So, Jace, are you planning on staying over? I could really use someone reasonable to talk to.” He nodded, even though he really hadn’t wanted to, because he knew how this would end—with a ring on her finger. He didn’t want to watch that, but if Barbara wanted him there, he would be there for her. Sometimes he wondered whether she suspected what he thought of her. He thought not, since he’d always been good at hiding things. She probably thought he just liked being a wisecracker--which was true. Still, the wisecracking came in handy.

Jason Todd hated Dick Grayson. But there was nothing he could do about it, except to tell another joke, scoot a little closer to the woman sitting next to him, and offer her a smile that said _I will support you no matter what happens because I have always understood you just like you have always understood me._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always felt like Oracle and Red Hood would have a special bond as the Bats most comfortable with killing. (Babs doesn't have a no-kill rule. She's not as gun-happy as Jason, but she's definitely killed.)
> 
> As for the whole Killing Joke thing...I get that she wasn't Batgirl at the time, but Babs would still have had good reflexes. My headcanon is that when she opened the door and saw the gun, instead of reacting to save her life, she reacted by trying to calculate whether to disarm him (i.e. whether it was important enough for her to risk letting Joker guess her secret identity and possibly other identities.) If there was enough time for him to tell her to smile, there was enough time for her to disarm him, but she was trying to figure out whether her life was worth those other identities, and he shot her in that moment of hesitation. I don't know if anybody else sees it that way. In any case, it's just a thought. (shrugs)
> 
> In Jason's iteration of Mark Twain canon, Dick is a (much more annoying to him) version of Tom Sawyer, Bruce is Widow Douglas, and Alfred is Miss Watson. 
> 
> Now imagine if Jason and Dick both faked their deaths and went off to be pirates...


	12. The Conference

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the adults ship it.

Bruce and Alfred met on the landing. “Well?” said Alfred.

Bruce sighed. “I did what you asked. I stopped yelling at him and talked to him about _why_ he would drop his communicator.”

Alfred raised an eyebrow. “And why did Master Dick drop his communicator?”

Bruce’s hand clenched briefly. “Because Barbara used her voice modulator on comms with him. Apparently, she turned him down. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know it was that.” He paused, his tone darkening with anger and frustration. “Why the hell would she turn him down? What sort of woman looks at my boy, who is smart, and strong, and amazing, and funny, and charming—who could ever look at the boy we raised and say that he isn’t _good enough_?”

Alfred didn’t offer a reply. After a moment, he ventured, “That’s not for us to determine, Master Bruce.”

Bruce paced five steps down the hallway, then turned and paced back. “He's heartbroken, Alfred. Won't even smile, not for anything. I thought--look, it doesn't matter what I thought, but I can’t see him hurting, like that, Alfred. I won’t. I’m going to talk to her. I am going to look her in the eyes and ask her why she turned him down—”

Alfred’s shoulders stiffened. “Master Bruce, that is a truly terrible idea. You cannot do that. It is not your business to interfere.”

Bruce groaned, leaning back against the wall. “I can’t do it, Alfred. I can’t let him be alone like me.”

Alfred looked confused. “You’re hardly alone, Master Bruce.”

“You know what I mean, Alfred. Look, you have to admit that you imagined things would work out like this, too. Remember the first time they kissed on patrol? They thought we’d never figure it out, and then Dick’s head was in the clouds for three solid weeks on end.”

Alfred sighed. “Ultimately, it’s up to them, Master Bruce. I’ve had my doubts, over the years, as to whether they were truly suited. But I will admit that I had always hoped for a favorable outcome to their courtship.”

“Her father wants it, too,” Bruce growled. “Barbara called him last night, and he called over here. He’s just as disappointed as we are. And he's right! I mean, who better for them than each other? They've been best friends since childhood, never able to get enough of each other, always sneaking off to go do things together. She grounds Dick, and--how could our boy _not_ make someone happy? If they knew what was good for them, they'd try. Don't they want this for themselves?”

Alfred’s eyes darted to the ceiling, as though he were surreptitiously imploring Heaven for patience. “I see the point of your argument, Master Bruce, but they are capable of making their own decisions.”

Bruce groaned. “So I’m not supposed to talk to either of them. I’m supposed to let them make a hash of it themselves.”

A door closed quietly upstairs. “Correct, Master Bruce.”


	13. A Promise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Damian has words for Dick.

Dick glanced over involuntarily as the door opened, but it was only Damian who had entered. “Grayson,” his brother asked, wearing an injured expression, “why did you disconnect your communicator during patrol last night?”

Dick sighed, wincing as the movement jarred his ribs. “Little D, I’m fine, okay? I was just upset at Oracle, and I didn’t want to talk to her.”

“You should.”

Dick squeezed his eyes shut against his incipient migraine. “What do you mean, Dami?”

His brother had made it to the chair Dick used for working at his desk. At the moment, Damian hadn’t figured out how to adjust it to his height, which meant that he was currently trying to propel himself to Dick’s bedside while seated on a spinning chair with his legs dangling nearly a foot off the ground. At the moment, his strategy seemed to involve flailing wildly in an attempt to create momentum. “Tt. Conversation is your favored solution to my problems, and you frequently complain that Father does not employ it enough.”

Dick reached up and ran a hand through his hair, groaning slightly as the movement jarred his ribs again. “Dami, Barbara doesn’t want to talk to me. And we already said everything we had to say. You should know that just as well as I do. Or did you actually get something when you visited her?”

Damian stopped mid-flail. “I paid no visit to Gordon, Grayson.”

Dick rolled over onto his side, ignoring the predictable burst of pain as, yet again, he jarred his ribs. “Damian, I know you did. So I’m assuming you didn’t get anything, which means you should probably stop telling me to talk to her!” he snapped.

Damian drew back, accidentally hitting the height-adjustment lever with his foot and careening wildly towards the floor. “Grayson, you are not acting in your usual manner. You are being highly dismissive of my attempts to assist you, and continually attempting to unleash a retaliatory outburst that I have not incurred through any of my personal actions. I hypothesize that, for reasons unknown to myself, you wish to be alone, and are resorting to offending each of your family members in order to achieve this. Therefore, I am prepared to give you what you so clearly desire. Perhaps such a situation will cause you to realize that shutting out your allies is not in your best interest. Until you come to this realization, I have no further assistance for you.”

Damian swept himself off the chair, drawing himself up to his full height haughtily. With one final glare at Dick, he strode out, closing the door softly behind him.

Dick buried his face in his pillow, aghast at the knowledge that he’d just lashed out at his baby brother. He hadn't done that before, not even when they were Batman and Robin. He'd always tried to make an effort to be considerate of Dami's feelings, to raise him with the compassion, empathy, and respect that Bruce had never quite managed to provide. And today, he'd snapped at Dami. 

 _Shutting your allies out_...yep, he'd been doing that, alright. He hadn't listened to Babs on patrol, and it had scored him broken ribs. _Great job, Grayson. Really mature of you, shutting your comm off to punish her._

But then again, he'd been immature throughout the whole process, hadn't he? He'd proposed to Babs because he had wandered and come home, and he'd finally realized who he was and what he wanted, just like she'd told him to all those years ago. But he had always assumed that she'd be home, waiting for him to come back.

He'd realized that he'd had enough, that he wanted the Gotham vigilante equivalent of 2.5 kids and a white picket fence, but Barbara hadn't gotten that luxury. Had she even left Gotham in the past year? He didn't think so.

He hadn't listened, really listened, to what she said when she broke up with him, because he'd been formulating points to use against her when it was his turn to talk.

_I don’t want to marry you, because it’s dangerous for both of us, I don’t trust you to stay here, and judging by the way you just yelled at me, you clearly aren’t in love with me._

It would be dangerous for them to get married, of course. But they'd gone over the risks the first time they considered moving in together, and decided that the advantages outweighed the disadvantages. Babs had been analytical about it, creating a list of pros and cons, weighting each consideration on a five-point scale. He loved that about her--the way her brain moved to wrap around a problem, breaking it up into its component pieces, they way she got excited when she'd nearly solved something.

She didn't trust him to stay. Thinking back on it, the statement was more than the racism he'd mistaken it for. It was a reflection on years of failures. He hadn't been there for her for years on end. He'd focused on finding himself, narcissistic as that may have been of him, and he hadn't thought she needed him with her. She'd even sent him away several times. "You still haven't done it. If you wanted to find yourself, Nightwing and Officer Grayson aren't it. They're both fake, Dick. It's not about finding a persona you like, it's about finding you. Go on, I'll wait. I can't wait to meet this Dick Grayson guy I've heard so much about."

He thought about all the flippant Skype calls they'd had, tossing flirty banter through the screen to each other as if they were still on the rooftops. But he didn't want to be Robin and Batgirl any more. If he could do it all over again, he would have stayed with her in Gotham. He would have listened to her talk, instead of chattering her ear off about his new friends and their powers, and all the excitement to be found in wherever-he-was-at-the-moment.  _Yep, I sure lived up to my name all these years._

He wasn't still in love with Batgirl, but he sure wished he could apologize to nineteen-year-old Babs for the hell that seventeen-year-old Dick was about to put her through. She was the most important woman in his life, and he hadn't been fair to her. She deserved a chance to find herself and decide what she wanted.

He missed having her wheelchair by his bed when he awoke from injuries. He missed the way she could solve a problem three different ways in the span of a second. He missed the way she fought tooth and nail to maintain an hour of uninterrupted quiet time to read, every night before patrol. He missed hearing her stand up to anybody who got in her way. He missed the way she finished his sentences.

If Babs wouldn't marry him, that was fine. If she didn't want him in her life, that would be-- _fine_ , he forced himself to finish. He would give her what she had so often given him in the past--time to figure herself out. He would still be around when she was back.

He hoped it wasn't too late.


	14. The Plot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Dick's siblings have Had Enough.

Cassandra Wayne saw things that nobody else saw. More accurately, she saw things that nobody else noticed. They were all little things: the way Bruce hunched over and tapped his toe inside his shoe when he talked to Alfred outside Dick’s door. The way Dick’s eyes had flickered to the door of his room when he heard Tim wheeling Damian’s bicycle down the hall so Alfred wouldn’t find it, and the way he’d smirked at the ceiling and stiffened his body against the bed when the wheels got closer, and the way he’d exhaled slowly and closed his eyes when the wheels passed. The way Barbara had clasped her hands when she asked how Dick was doing. The way Jason had leaned into Barbara in the backseat of the Beetle. The way Damian’s fingers had lingered on the ring box when he handed it to her. The way Tim buried himself in his tablet whenever anyone seemed likely to talk to him. The way Steph gave a half-smile and a half-shrug and a half-eyebrow raise when she said that she’d heard it was a “Bat-family weekend getaway,” and she thought she should join. The way Barbara kept one hand on a wheel of her chair at all times for a quick retreat. The way Damian had evacuated to the den, where he played video games with a ruthless determination and one eye on the door.

Cass saw all these things. She saw the way her family had gotten stuck, each in their own private moral dilemma. She saw the stalemate on the chessboard. But the chess pieces had to become more like dominoes, moving each other in a chain reaction that would either work beautifully or blow up in everyone’s faces.

She started the chain reaction by sitting down between Damian and Tim on the couch in the shared room. Steph, curled up by the fireside, groaned. “Hi, Cass. You don’t have to say hi back. You actually have an excuse to not talk, unlike everybody _else_ in this house.”

“Hi,” said Cass.

Damian growled ferociously as he blasted a LEGO Sandtrooper to bits, watching as it decomposed into bricks and studs. He walked Han Solo around to collect the coins, then proceeded onward towards where Jabba the Hutt waited with the imprisoned Princess Leia.

“They should talk,” he muttered.

“Who?” asked Steph. “Han and Leia? Spoiler: they kind of don’t, kid. They don’t talk right up until the moment where she realizes that he thinks she’s in love with her brother. Actually, come to think of it, they don’t really even talk then. They just kind of start shoving their tongues down each other’s throats.”

“I have no concerns for these imbeciles, although Han Solo does show significant promise as a fighter. They are fictional, and as such, will settle their own concerns without my interference. I was referring to Grayson and Gordon.”

Cass settled back against the cushions. _It’s working._ “They don’t want to.”

Tim looked up from his tablet. “Um, guys, shouldn’t we just let them handle their own deal?”

But Steph was up from the fireplace, and she’d perched on the armchair beside Tim. She rolled her eyes at him. “Oh come on, Boy Social Blunder. Are you telling me you’re enjoying the will-they-won’t-they drama? Seriously, they’re starting to move past cute Jim-and-Pam territory and into the annoying Cathy-and-Heathcliff zone. And that’s really not a good thing. Unless you fancy hearing them snarking at each other at every family gathering from now until they reach Beatrice-and-Benedict age. I’m calling it. This ends now, so get your genius brain on it, Drake.”

Tim looked mildly surprised by his girlfriend’s outburst. “Fine, Steph. I hate it too. Happy?”

She grinned slyly at him. “Not quite. Kiss me, think of a solution to this wacky Dick-and-Barbara mess, and then we’ll call it even.”

Tim groaned. “Steph, they’re not going to talk. She leaves any room she’s in the instant someone enters. It’s like she’s trying to avoid everyone.”

Cass shifted slightly against the pillows. “We have to stop her from leaving.”

There was a silence in the room, broken only by the death rattle of Jabba the Hutt. Damian was the first to speak. “That is an acceptable proposition, Cain. If I understand correctly, the most efficient way in which to ensure a conversation between Gordon and Grayson is to lock them in an enclosed area and block all means of escape.”

Tim and Steph looked at one another helplessly. “Yeah,” said Tim weakly, “that sounds about right.”

“Good,” said Damian, pausing the game. “Let us discuss the matter of location and timing. Grayson will be mobile by tomorrow, but I am uncertain if he will attempt to leave his room. Therefore, our plans need to be ready to be activated at any hour of the day or night. Drake, your knowledge of the Manor is more thorough than mine. Considering Grayson’s significant athletic prowess, what locations would be impenetrable to the combined talents of him and Gordon?”

Tim sighed, pulling up the schematics for the Manor on his tablet. “Well, the Cave’s out. She could just hack the locks. We’d need something where the locks aren’t electronic, and where there aren’t handles on the insides of the doors. And no windows, or really small windows, because otherwise Dick will just climb out.”

Steph tapped her heels against the couch impatiently. “Oh c’mon, guys, doesn’t your creepy castle have some sort of weird dungeon? It doesn’t even have to be a big dungeon.”

Damian craned his neck to see the schematics. “Tt. The library suits our specifications, and has the added benefit of being a location in which both of them might reasonably spend time.”

Tim nodded. “Okay, the library it is. Um, how are we going to get them in there?”

Steph sighed. “I’ll handle Babs. You guys wrangle Dick. Then, we make our excuses, get out, and lock the door. We can lock the windows just in case, though I’m pretty sure they’re too small for Dick’s shoulders.”

“But how will we make them aware of the conditions of their incarceration? They need to be informed that their confinement will be ended, provided that they have a discussion of the status of their relations. Furthermore, how can we monitor them to ensure that they actually do carry on such a communication?”

Tim groaned. “Demonspawn’s got a point. Besides, how are we supposed to lure Dick to the library, and then manage to beat him to the exit, all without him noticing Barb and bolting?”

Steph crossed her arms impatiently. “Um, hello, guys? I’m the one who has to singlehandedly trick my mentor, who probably has the highest IQ in this house right now. I’m doing that, and I’m not complaining. Can the two of you supposed geniuses put your heads together and find a way to drag your idiot brother to a library, or do I need Cass to do it nonverbally?”

Cass silently reflected that she would probably have more success with Dick than Tim and Damian. The boys were both atrocious actors, although Tim’s civilian persona was quite convincing.

Tim and Damian grumbled acquiescence. “My points still stand,” said Damian.

Steph rolled her eyes at Cass, as if to say, _can you believe these idiots_? But her relaxed posture betrayed her fondness for them. “Alright, kiddo. We’ll shout instructions through the door. Satisfied?”

Damian folded his arms. “What about appropriate monitoring? I do not believe that security cameras have been installed in the library.”

Cass spoke, watching as the boys suddenly remembered that she was in the room. “You cannot make a horse drink.”

Damian scrunched up his nose. “Cain, that is utterly nonsensical—”

Steph tapped him on the shoulder. “It’s a saying. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. And she’s right. Our job is just to make all the conditions align so that they’re likely to talk to each other. We really shouldn’t sit with an ear to the door and listen to make sure they talk.”

“Hmph,” said Damian. “I intend to monitor the situation. Now, I believe that Father is approaching, so would you be so kind as to vacate the premises, and not discuss this plan to a single living soul on pain of an agonizing death?”

Steph giggled. Cass retreated, satisfied with a job well done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to take a moment and thank everyone for all the lovely encouraging comments I've been getting!! You guys are the best!


	15. Cuddling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which two crazy idiots get their act together and have an actual conversation. Just not the two you thought I meant.

Tim was looking over the specs for WE’s new photographic pen when someone knocked on his door. “Come in,” he called without looking. “Just give me a minute.”

“We need to talk,” said Steph from behind him, and every castle in the air Tim had ever built tumbled down around his feet instantly. _No. There is literally no way Steph is gonna break up with me._

Instantly, Tim flung down his tablet, whirling around in his chair. “What did I do, Steph? I—I’m sorry, whatever it was. Just—I know I’ve been busy, but I promise that I’ll be better. Did I forget your birthday?”

She laughed as she sat down gingerly on his bed. Tim suddenly became conscious that his room wasn’t fit for human eyes. No matter how hard Alfred cleaned it in the morning, Tim always managed to inadvertently turn his room into a disaster zone before dinner time. He messed up everything he dealt with. _God, I don’t deserve her._ “Tim, calm down. I just want to know why you’re mad at me. You’ve barely been talking to me for a couple days, and then in front of Cass and Damian, you acted like everything was alright. Did I do something? Are you really still upset that I got shot?”

Tim rubbed his eyes blearily, becoming conscious that he hadn’t gotten a full night of sleep in a long while. “What? Steph, I’m not mad. I’m really not mad at all. Why would you think that I was mad?”

Steph pulled him over onto the bed with her. “I don’t know,” she said, looking down at the floor glumly. “I just—well, I’ve been complaining about Dick and Barbara for hours now, and you just acted really uncomfortable. But when it came up with other people there, you listened. So I know I’m clingy, and I know it’s wrong, but you’ve been acting super—what was that SAT word? Oh, aloof. You’ve been aloof. And I hate it, and I want it to stop.” She sniffed slightly.

Tim wrapped an arm around Steph’s waist, leaning over to kiss her head. “Hey, hey, hey. Don’t get all weepy on me, okay? Listen, I am so sorry. I have been a _horrible_ boyfriend, and I promise I’ll make it up to you. And I’m sorry about the Dick and Barbara thing. I was just worried about what to do, because, well, Barbara’s your mentor, and I didn’t really know if you were siding with her in this. I mean, I _totally_ see her side of things, of course, but he’s my brother, and I don’t feel like I can totally side against him? So I was just kind of trying to—avoid it? I don’t know, Steph, and it has been absolute hell around here. Not that that’s any excuse.”

She sniffed again, nuzzling her head into his shoulder. “I didn’t know that, Tim. I didn’t really think about that part. It's just that watching Barbara and Dick being idiots at each other—I guess it just made me realize that you and I are idiotic half the time. And there are no sides, except for team Get-These-People-To- _Talk_ -Instead-Of-Moping-Around-Byronically.”

He brushed her hair back from her face. “Steph, I can’t describe how sorry I am. Just—look, say it’s okay, alright? Please? Or I’ll start asking Dick and Jason for romantic advice.”

She smiled, looking up at him with trust and a returning glimmer of spunk. His stomach did a quadruple somersault. “Of course you’re forgiven. And those idiots should be asking you for advice, not the other way around.”

“Prove it,” Tim challenged.

Steph raised an eyebrow. “Prove what?”

“That we’re the most stable couple in this messed-up family.”

“There’s hardly a lot of competition. What do you have in mind?”

He pulled her face to his and kissed her. She responded, but pulled away when he bit her lower lip. “Introduce me to your mom.”

Steph leapt off the bed like it had burned her. “No _way_. She knows you as Red Robin, and _that_ is the way it is going to _stay_. There is no way I need the inferiority complex that goes with introducing a freaking _billionaire_ to my mom as my _boyfriend_.”

“I’ve seen your house already,” he pointed out, grabbing her hand and tugging her back down. She jerked once, and he let her go.

“Yeah, but I don’t—I don’t—look, Tim, I like you, okay? And under any other circumstances, I'd be all for this, but I don’t want to accidentally out you, and there is no good story for how we met, and—”

“Steph, I trust you. And if you’re not planning on early retirement, then your mom is going to find out about us, and she’s definitely going to figure out the secret identities of everyone involved in this. This isn’t Romeo and Juliet, Steph. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“You say,” she muttered grouchily.

He pulled her down, and this time she let him drag her. “C’mon. Just let me ask one more time, and then I promise I’ll let it go. I don’t want you to have to sneak around about this. I like you a lot, and I want everyone to know that I’m your boyfriend.” He paused, suddenly realizing what he’d just said. “Well, maybe not Vicki Vale. Or my exes. Or Ra’s Al Ghul, or Deathstroke, or the Joker, or…you get the picture,” he summed up lamely. “But I want to meet your mom as Tim Drake-Wayne, not as Red Robin. Because ultimately, Red Robin and Batgirl are not the people who like each other here, okay? At least, I don’t think so. I love _you_ , not the uniform.”

She stiffened. “You said it…Tim, I—”

He cursed mentally. “Oh my god, Steph, I—I—I didn’t mean for it to come out that way. I wanted you to know it was true—it is true, I mean it. And you don’t have to say it back if you don’t want to— _oh_.”

Steph kissed him, probably just to shut him up. “I love you. Although I can’t believe you said it first, considering it took you years to give me your name. And I’m not going to start on how hard it was to get your number.”

“Shhh. Give me a second. I want to bask in how amazing this is.”

She leaned her back against his chest. “It is kind of amazing.”

“So, does you being in love with me mean that I can meet your mom?”

She rolled her eyes. “I really don’t see why you want to meet her again. You’ve met her already. And you still haven’t figured out how we met.”

“I’ll figure it out. Does that mean yes?”

“Fine,” she grumbled.

“Did I mention that I love you? Like, a lot?”

“Not often enough.”


	16. Trail of Cookies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Damian and Tim are forced to brainstorm together, and Jason's get-back-together playlist is decidedly unhelpful.

Tim ate his dinner in a haze of bliss. Steph loved him. He was going to be Steph’s boyfriend, officially, in the eyes of the entire world (with the exception of the paparazzi and Gotham’s villain populace.) Nothing could possibly go wrong. Everyone and everything in the world was amazing…

And then Damian pulled him aside after dinner, and Tim came back down to earth. “Replacement. We should discuss our strategies for luring Grayson to the library.”

Tim dragged him into his bedroom and shut the door. “Shhh!” he hissed. “We are _so_ grounded if Alfred heard you say that!”

Damian had perched on Tim's bed with his legs crossed. “Tt. There is no possibility that Pennyworth could have heard us. I was extremely circumspect, Drake.”  
  
Tim resisted the urge to lose his cool. “Damian, you were about as circumspect as James Bond. You may as well have yelled, _“we are hiding something super-secret that we need to confer about in the hallway, please wonder what's going on!”_ ”

Damian pouted. “Nonsense, Replacement. Now, what course of action do you intend to pursue in luring Grayson to the library?”

Tim sighed, coming to grips with the miserable fact that his perfect evening was no more. “I don't know, Dem--Damian. What ideas have you had?”

“We simply need to decide what Grayson enjoys. I have noticed his passion for baked goods on multiple occasions. I suggest that we place a trail of cookies leading to the library. Once he has followed it to its conclusion, we can lock him inside.”

Tim wiped his eyes. Had his baby brother _really_ just suggested that they lure a twenty-eight-year-old to a library with _cookies_? Then again, he supposed that Damian’s assassin training hadn’t covered _"Nonviolent Ways to Lure One’s Brother to a Library."_ Damian added helpfully, “If you are worried about possible nutritional harm to Grayson from eating cookies that are placed in a public location, I suggest that we suspend them at a height difficult for a non-acrobat to reach, which will decrease the risk of contamination. That will also prevent the possibility of Fatgirl pre-empting our plan by consuming the cookies herself.”

Tim deliberated. Should he tell Damian not to insult his girlfriend, unless he wanted to be pounded to a pulp? Should he ask Damian how he intended to get the cookies up to a height that a non-acrobat couldn’t reach? He could point out that even _Dick_ wasn’t stupid enough to follow a trail of cookies. Instead, he pulled out a notebook, made a list headed _“Ways to get Dick to the library”_ , and wrote diligently, “ _Trail of cookies_.”

“Okay, what else? We could tell him that there's a new shipment of books in. What sort of books does Dick enjoy?”

Both of them pondered this for a moment. “Grayson's literary preferences are not my area of expertise,” said Damian. “Perhaps you could pretend that you heard an intruder breaking into the library and wanted to call for backup?”

Tim shook his head. “In broad daylight? And why would I ask him for backup? He's injured, in case you didn't notice, Demon Brat.”

“Perhaps it would be more efficacious to simply sedate him, restrain him, and deliver him to the library. Then, Gordon can untie him before they begin their discussion.” Tim bit back a groan. How was _sedation_ the kid's solution to literally everything?

“Yeah, but it wastes time. We have to get all of this done before Alfred figures out and lets them out. If she has to wait for him to wake up, then that’s _ages_ more that Alfred has to notice they’re gone.”

Damian tapped his fingers on his knees. “We could dress as ninjas and kidnap the both of them. That would successfully mask our involvement, and double as a favor to Fatgirl by preventing her from having to deceive Oracle.”

Tim nearly spluttered. He could have asked Damian what they would say when Dick and Barb asked why ninjas had taken such an interest in their love life. Instead, he wrote in the notebook, “ _Dress as ninjas_.” After a second, he added, “ _Sedate_ ” with a question mark. _How is this my life?_

“Okay, so we have Trail of Cookies, Sedate, and Dress as Ninjas. Let’s get one more, and then decide. Um, what do you think are reasons why Dick might need to go to the library under ordinary circumstances?”

Damian drew his knees to his chest, uncrossing his legs. “Tt. Grayson’s presence in the library is practically nonexistent. He hasn’t set foot in there of his own volition for several years.”

“Well, that doesn’t help--hang on, what do you mean, of his own volition?”

Damian sighed. “Recently, Grayson has taken to assisting me with my homework. He quizzes me in preparation for my examinations, and we conduct such sessions in the library for ease of access to reference materials. Grayson’s knowledge is ridiculously spotty, so our sessions often result in his edification, rather than mine. His knowledge of Gibbons v. Ogden, Dartmouth v. Woodward, and other Supreme Court cases relating to early economic law in this country is positively shameful.”

Tim leaned back in his chair jubilantly. “I’ve got it. You can tell Dick you’ve got a test, and you want his help studying. Then, you get to the library, and say you want to go get a snack, or you forgot your textbook, or something. The instant Steph gets Barb in there, we lock the door.”

Damian sat back. “That seems like a reasonable course of action, Drake. Now, let us move on to our next order of business. I informed Todd of our intentions, and he suggested that the process of reconciliation might be expedited by the addition of appropriate music. We took the liberty of preparing a playlist, subject to your approval.”

Tim bit his lip as Damian handed his iPod over proudly. “My original tactic was to merely download any song with the word “Love” in the title, but Todd convinced me that many songs contain romance within their subtexts without explicitly mentioning it in the title.”

Tim couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he nodded, pressing play without looking at the titles of the songs.

The first one was “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” which Tim supposed was okay, if a little tacky.

The second one was “Love Yourself,” by Justin Bieber. Tim pulled a face and decided he’d delete it privately later.

The third one (“This is where Todd became involved,” Damian announced) was “Like A Virgin.” Tim focused all his attention on maintaining a deadpan.

The fourth one was “Teenage Dream.”

The fifth one was “Say No to This” from Hamilton. _Why? He could have picked “Helpless.” But no, he picked the Sexy Affair Song._ Tim leaned back and resigned himself to martyrdom.

The sixth one was “Broken Crown” by Mumford and Sons. _Damn you, Jason._

The seventh one was “I’m Sexy and I Know It.”

He was unexpectedly saved when the iPod started in on “Big Balls” by AC/DC. Damian listened for several minutes before switching it off. “My apologies,” he said coolly. “I have no idea why Todd would add this to the playlist. Clearly, the construction of extremely large spheres can be achieved with proper capital and good attention to engineering. It’s as if the speaker in the song doesn’t understand that the dome is the most stable of architectural designs! I fail to see what this ridiculously repetitive and inane song has to do with the act of reconciliation, and I will speak to Todd.” _Never change, Demonbrat._

“Honestly, I think that music might keep them from focusing on each other. It might just be too big of a distraction.”

Tim held his breath as Damian considered. _Please agree. Please. Otherwise, I’ll have to talk to Bruce about enrolling you in Health at school._

“That makes sense, Drake. I believe the plan is finalized, then. I will see you when we carry it out. I believe that the start of operations has been set for one PM tomorrow.”

 _Just after lunch. I can do that._ “Thanks, Dami.”

Tim considered confronting Jason about his life choices, but decided that getting some sleep before patrol would be a better use of his time.


	17. The Phone Call

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which it turns out that Barbara heard Bruce and Alfred talking about how much the adults shipped her and Dick.

Barbara Gordon gave herself until the next morning to cool down before she made the phone call. Unfortunately, she didn’t end up cooling down at all. The words kept swirling through her head, mindlessly repeating, thrumming against her skull.  _Her father wants it too...I will admit that I had always hoped for a favorable outcome to their courtship...Barbara called him last night, and he called over here...He’s just as disappointed as we are...who could ever look at the boy we raised and say that he isn’t good enough...her father wants it too...why the hell did she turn him down...her father wants it too..._

“Hello?”

“Hey, Dad, it’s Barbara.”

“Hi, Barb! What are you doing at the manor?”

She sighed. “Dad, you remember. It’s that whole communicator thing. You know, Bruce needs that communicator from lockup because it could endanger my cover? Anyway, he’s got me in the Bat-version of protective custody. So I just didn’t want you to worry if you couldn’t get ahold of me last night.” _Let him confess to talking about me behind my back._

There was a pause on the other end. “Um, so, how are you taking it?”

“Fine. I promise. You don’t have to worry, okay? If I was in any danger of getting in a funk, Dinah talked me out of it.” That was a lie, of course.

He chuckled warmly. “Good for her, Barb. What’s eating at you?”

She tried, unsuccessfully, to tamp down the rage and frustration that had been boiling in her chest ever since she closed the door on the landing. “Nothing. I’m just wondering why you called Bruce and Alfred to complain that I turned Dick down.”

The other line went silent. “Barb, please don’t be upset at me, okay? I just want you to be happy, and it was just guy talk. It was all in good fun.”

Barbara flew off the handle, completely, spectacularly, and vehemently. “ _Guy talk?_ Do you understand what I’m dealing with here, Dad? I am literally _surrounded_ by Dick’s family, who are all extremely violent people, and none of whom are very thrilled about this! And he’s just moaning and grouching, which means that his entire family of _extremely violent people on whom my life currently depends_ are placing the blame for the breakup squarely on me! So it would be really nice if I could have someone in my corner on this, besides Jason, who’s somehow the sanest person in this house right now. They’re being all stiffly polite to me because they don’t want to lose Oracle, but not _one_ of them is interested in hearing my side of the story. So yeah, I did _not_ need to overhear Bruce telling Alfred that you always wished I would marry Dick Grayson, because this is not the nineteenth century, Dad! You do not get to have a say in anything I do, so will you stop acting like I’m property that suddenly developed a mind of its own?”

Jim Gordon, who was used to his daughter, sighed. “Barb? You good?”

“I’m better. Now do you have anything to say before I go yell at Bruce and Alfred?”

“Barb, that conversation did not go the way you imagine it did, okay?”

“How did it go, then?”

“Like this. I called to ask for more specifics on what he needed stolen from lockup, and when. He gave me them. Then, as I was getting off the line, I said, “By the way, Wayne, I hear my girl broke up with your boy yesterday. How’s he doing?” And then he growled a bit, and said, “Dick’s fine.” I felt bad for the kid, so I said, “Well, I know that Barb really likes him, so tell him to buck up for me, alright?” And then he didn’t say anything, so I said, “Are you disappointed? I’m a little upset, myself. Barb hasn’t ever met anyone else to hold a candle to him, and I don’t want her to be alone.” And he took a second, and then he said, “I don’t want Dick to be alone, either.” And then I said, “Well, let’s get them back together again, alright?” But I meant it as a joke, so you need to stop being paranoid. I love you a lot, and I’m counting on you to show those Bats that the Gordons are just as good as they are. No matter what happens, I support you, Barb. I just have my own opinions, and I like the kid, personally. If you don’t want to marry him, I’ll shut up about it.”

She melted fractionally. “Thanks, Dad. But can we get that evidence stolen fast, please? That way I can get out of here. Bruce didn’t even give me time to pack a hairbrush.”

“Okay, will do. And I’ll send you some stuff from your apartment, okay? Love you.”

“Love you, too. Stay safe. Bye.”

She moaned and let her head fall onto the desk, trying to decide if the momentary satisfaction of unleashing her indignation was worth making things even more difficult between herself and the Waynes.

_Does it feel good, shutting people out, Babs?_

No, it didn’t. But that hadn’t stopped her from letting her frustration get the better of her. It never did stop her.

_“Yelling doesn't help, Babs.”  
_

_“You think? You try not getting to punch people when you’re mad. Okay? I hate the chair, and I hate everyone, and I hate my stupid life.”  
_

_“Babs, calm down. You don’t hate your life, I know you don’t.”  
_

_“Stop telling me what I think! You don’t understand anything! Okay? I am sick of being the rational one! Why can’t I hate my life if I want to? I know you like being happy, but you have reasons to be happy! I have nothing left!”  
_

_“You have me. You have your dad. You have Dinah, and Kara. You have my family. We’re here for you, okay? And if you need to yell, yell at me from now on. I can take it.”_

Dick would have stopped her. He would have dragged her into a room and let her rant at him about not being a piece of property, about wanting free will. 

She thought he’d never been there for her, but he always had been. Even if he wasn’t physically present, the very idea of him--perpetually naïve, always bouncy, untainted by the life he lived--had always been there. She’d always had some deep, secure knowledge that, even if they were fighting, he would be there if she needed him.

She had never asked, and so he had never come.

For a split second, Barbara allowed herself to imagine the life she would have had if she had agreed to marry Dick. _I came so close; maybe if I wasn’t so mad about the day before, I would have said yes. I love him so much._ But she always let petty frustrations keep her from the life she wanted.

They would wake up late and eat breakfast together. She’d teach him to cook something other than junk food. They could spend the entire day doing work or whatever they wanted to, of course, but they would have those precious few hours between the end of the day and the start of the night all to themselves. She wouldn’t have to watch him leave and wonder when he'd come back. Her imagination went still farther and supplied a house full of screaming, laughing children. Her father, meeting his grandchildren. Picnics on Sundays. And Dick, always Dick, there by her side, every day, radiating his own special brand of happiness.

She forced her imagination to follow the thought through to its natural conclusion. Hearing a scream over Dick’s comm some night, calming the pounding of her heart, calling for backup. Trying to wrap her brain around the fact that she would never see his smile again. Picking herself up, explaining to the kids, and living the rest of her life without him.

She couldn’t lose him. She had to keep him safe.

But a small voice in her head reminded her that breaking up with him hadn’t made either of them safer. It had only made him drop his comm, thereby endangering himself.

There weren’t many reasons _not_ to marry Dick, when she thought about it. With the ease of long practice, Barbara dismantled her own carefully constructed arguments. _He’s immature, yes, but that’s why I love him. I can’t have kids, but we could adopt. He could love a_ pet rock _with all his heart and soul if he put his mind to it. He’s stuck in the past, but saying that he’s in love with my younger self is an oversimplification. Knowing him, he probably just misses the time when we were both happy most of the time._

She considered rushing into Dick’s room to explain that she _understood_ , that she didn’t know if it would work out, but she’d rather risk it all than lose him. But she checked herself and went through what she knew of Dick, which was quite a lot. After all, she was his oldest friend (always excepting Zitka, but Barbara was fairly content to be his oldest _human_ friend.) He always took a few days to recover from an argument, and he hated being apologized to if he was still sulking. Barbara couldn’t afford to mess this up. Regretfully, she decided to give him a bit more time. 

_He’s benched tonight, but he’ll be allowed out of bed, so I can see if he wants to talk while everyone else is gone. If he doesn’t, that’s fine. He’ll come around.  
_

_He had better. He had really better._


	18. The Plan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the conspirators carry out their scheme, and Damian's knowledge of US economic policy doesn't necessarily mean that he knows anything about 1920s government scandals.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a short update today...I envision roughly 2 ish chapters left in this! Thanks so much for reading, everyone! You guys rock!!

Barbara had just finished lunch (potato salad and roast chicken) when Steph grabbed her by the arm. “Um, Babs? Can we go talk somewhere? I need a hacking tutorial. Somewhere quiet?”

“Sure. How about my room?”

Steph bit her lip worriedly. “I would say yes ordinarily, but I think that Damian has some sort of wacky plan going to lock you in there with Dick and not let you guys out until you talk about your issues.” Barbara leaned her head against the back of her chair and moaned. 

“Alright. Let’s do the library, then. I’m handling the Dick situation on my own.” They took the elevator up and situated themselves in the computer bay at the far end. “So what do you need help hacking?” asked Barbara.

Steph worried her lip some more. “Well, see, I think there’s cheating going on at college. At the student store, they have USB’s for sale, and I keep on noticing people asking for a type that isn’t on the shelf, and then paying extra after the cashier gets it from the back. So I bought one, but I can’t figure out how to get into it. It has one of those things where if you guess the password wrong three times it self-destructs. Like on Sherlock. Anyway—oh, dammit, where is it?” she muttered, patting her pockets and shaking out her purse, “I was thinking you could probably show me how to get in.”

“Do you have it with you?”

Steph ran a hand through her hair. “Let me think…oh! I left it in Tim’s room. Give me five, okay? Get comfy.” She sprinted out anxiously. Barbara sighed and turned back around to the computer.

The door opened two minutes later. “Dami, I already told you, I don’t know anything about the Teapot Dome Scandal. But if it would help you to tell me about it, I’ll listen.” _Crap. Damian found me somehow._ She wheeled herself into a far corner behind a bookshelf, hoping that he would give up and go away. It was a fairly futile hope, but it was more likely than her other hope, which was that she would be able to escape before he locked the doors. 

She heard Damian’s voice saying, “One moment, Grayson. I believe I have forgotten my padlo—I mean, my _pencils_. For the diagram. Of Teapot Dome. Or was it Watergate? Anyway, part of my exam requires that I draw a diagram. Of the dome part of Teapot Dome, in relation to the rest of the teapot.”

Barbara snorted to herself, because the kid clearly had no clue what Teapot Dome actually was. She briefly considered yelling to Dick so that he could stop Damian. But then she remembered: he still didn’t know that she’d forgiven him. Knowing Dick, he’d get caught up in that detail and forget the part about stopping his crazy younger brother from trapping him in the library. Besides, Steph would be back soon.

She heard Damian’s footsteps racing out, heard Dick settling himself at a desk. And then she heard the door slam shut. A lock clicked, and-- _hang on, those giggles are too high-pitched for Damian. Come to think of it, I’ve never heard Damian giggle, which means that that’s someone else…  
_

 _Steph is in on it. I_ really _should have seen it coming._

 _Shit._ Barbara dove frantically through her memory for the speech she’d intended to make during patrol that night. But she hadn’t finished planning everything out yet. None of her thoughts were in order, nothing was the way it was supposed to be.

Tim’s voice came through the door. “Hi guys. Um, everyone around here is kind of fed up with the moping and brooding. It’s bad when Bruce does it, but it really looks awful on you two. So we’re putting you guys on timeout until you actually have a conversation with each other. We’ll come back in a while. Just—um, consider yourselves really, really lucky that I nixed Dami’s playlist selections. And that I’m dragging him away so he doesn’t eavesdrop. Anyway, I’m sorry, guys. It’s for your own good.”

“Et tu, Timmy?” yelled Dick, roughly twelve shelves down.

“Um, I don’t think Brutus says anything in response to that. But, yeah, me too. And Steph, and Cass. And Jason, sort of. Anyway, bye.” They heard a brief scuffle, an annoyed yell from Damian, and receding footsteps.

Barbara settled down in her wheelchair. Briefly, she contemplated making Dick do the work to find her. It was his family that had gotten them in this situation, after all. But cold-shouldering him now would be unnecessarily cruel, and it wouldn’t be a good conversation starter. With a passing thought for the absolute hell she was going to give those kids when they let her out, she straightened back up. “Hey, Dick, I’m over here.”

 _I want this,_ she reminded herself. _Even if this isn’t how I wanted to do it, I want to get back together with him.  
_

_Damn his family._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To clarify, there will be a brief detour chapter in two days (featuring Jason, Cass, and Steph), followed by the actual conversation between Dick and Babs two days after that! (Just so no one expects the rest of this conversation next time and then gets disappointed with the detour! :D)


	19. The Barbara's Strays Club

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Steph and Cass put Jason under citizen's arrest.

Jason stayed after lunch to help Alfred clean up. He had never been very comfortable in the lap of luxury, so helping out with chores had become his own private compromise. He got to feel less guilty about eating food he didn’t buy himself, and Alfred got help with the cleanup.

He didn’t turn the light on when he reached his guest room. Patrol had gone late, and Bruce and Alfred didn’t control him. “ _Appropriate sleep schedules_ ” be damned, he deserved a nap. Shrugging off his jacket, he collapsed onto the bed.

The bed--or rather, Cass, who had been sitting on it--pushed him off of herself.

Jason didn’t have time for this. “Alright, I’m only going to ask once, Cassie. What the hell are you doing in my room?”

She pulled her knees to her chest, leaning her shoulders against the headboard. “Keeping you here.”

Jason resisted the overwhelming urge to shake her violently. “And why are you keeping me here?” he growled.

She tapped a finger against her knee thoughtfully. “For Steph.”

That was bad news. Ever since the Joker, Jason had had a... _thing_ about people who smiled too much. He hadn’t had much to do with Steph outside of missions for Barbara. But he knew her well enough to know that she was fucking _relentless_. The only reason that their shopping trip together didn’t haunt his nightmares was that he had literally died and come back to life as a stone-cold killer. She wasn’t the best fighter of the family, but he was fairly sure that even the Joker would pass on going shopping with her. The way she skipped between the aisles, laden down with bags in assorted shades of hideous pink, the shopping cart careening ahead of her, smiling with a dangerous sweetness as she forced him onwards, store after store, mile after mile…

Not many people could brag about having tired Jason Todd out. Steph Brown was one of those people. If she was after him, it was bad.

“Cassie,” he began wheedlingly, “I’m your brother, right? Blood, thicker than water, and all that?”

“Not my blood. Adopted.”

Damn. There went that idea. “Tell you what, Cassie. If you tell Steph that I haven’t come in here, I’ll--I’ll--” He paused, unsure what girls of that age enjoyed. A book, maybe? But he had no idea what her reading level was. “I’ll--get you pictures from when Goldie and I were younger! And you can tease him about them.”

Cass’s eyes darted ever so slightly upwards. Was that an eyeroll? Jason figured it wasn’t good news, whatever it was. “Steph said you’d bribe me,” she observed, with a faint trace of amusement.

He swore.

“And swear.”

“Do me a favor, and shut up, okay? I’m armed.”

She didn’t dignify that one with an immediate reply. After a moment, she added meditatively, “I’ve beaten Bruce. I thought she was wrong.”

Those sentences didn’t make sense together. “About what?”

“That you’d try threatening me.”

He managed to restrain his outward reaction that time. But Cass probably caught it anyway.

“I’m screwed, aren’t I?” he muttered.

The corners of Cass’s lips slanted up wryly. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“Steph,” she said simply, closing her eyes as if to indicate that their conversation was at an end.

Jason shifted his weight off from the bed, an inch at a time, watching his guardian carefully. Cass didn’t move. She might almost have been asleep. If it came down to a fight, he had at least a foot on her, but that wouldn’t matter if she could beat Bruce. He’d have to think of some way to distract her.

He was about to touch a single toe warily to the ground when Steph made her grand entrance.

“Jay! Long time no see! You and I are almost never around here at the same time!”

He gave up on escape. “Nice to see you, too, Blondie,” he said, gritting his teeth. “Care to explain why I’m under citizen’s arrest?”

Cass, who had sprawled her legs out until they occupied a full third of the (ginormous) bed, smirked at Steph. “Bribing, swearing, threatening, in order. You were right.”

Steph grinned hugely. “I always am.”

Jason flopped back onto the unoccupied two thirds. “You still haven’t told me why we’re all here.”

Steph bounced into an armchair, neglecting the accompanying ottoman and crossing her legs on the nightstand instead. “We’re here because your musical taste is icky. You know, I date Tim, who showed me the playlist you recommended to Dami.”

“Cut to the chase, I swear, or they won’t find your fucking body.”

Steph wiggled her eyebrows at Cass, as if to say, _Oooh, feisty, isn’t he?_ Cass grunted in response. “Alright, alright, don’t get your AK-47s in a twist. Your secret’s safe with us.”

“What secret?” he yelled exasperatedly.

Steph clucked her tongue. “See, Tim and Dami, they have the emotional subtlety of a--” she snapped her fingers “--oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue--c’mon, Cass, what’s something that isn’t emotionally subtle?”

“Bruce,” supplied Cass.

“Bruce,” agreed Steph. “They have the emotional subtlety of Bruce. Like Batman, like Robin. Anyway, us Batgirls, we actually _feel_ human emotions, so we can recognize them.”

She was worse than Goldie. “Are you done?”

“Just getting started,” she said wickedly. “Anyway, Tim looked at the playlist and saw a threat to the plan. I saw--” she leaned forward, barely breathing the words “--sabotage. In the name of _love_.”

He decided to go for the easy way out. “I’m not in love with Dickie Bird. Now get the hell out of my room.”

Steph rolled her eyes. “Not Dick. _Duh_. You can barely stand to be around him, and if it’s because of UST, I’ll--eat my hat. Or my cowl. Whatever. It’s just because you hate happy people, and you also hate him. Anyway, you do realize that I hang out with Babs all the time, right? So yeah, I know. It's not like you're super subtle. And Cass knows. She’s the one who convinced me we had to fix it.”

Jason swung round on the bed to shoot Cass an injured glare. She shrugged it off. “You leaned into her. In the car.”

In hindsight, he should not have expressed himself using body language while in a car with someone who literally _spoke_ it. He asked the only question he could. “Does she know?”

Steph gave a “ _who am I to say?_ ” shrug. “She’s Babs. Who knows how deep her computer banks run?”

“She doesn’t know,” Cass informed them. Jason blinked, and accepted it as fact.

He lay back down resignedly. “So you guys are here to cure me of liking Babs. Figures.”

Steph snorted. “Are you kidding? I’m literally the only person in this house who has experienced the horribleness of having an unrequited crush on a member of this family. It sucks. It really, _really_ sucks. No, we’re here to convince you that you actually like her platonically. If that fails, we’re here to hold you when you cry your eyes out over her and Dick getting engaged. Or, if you don’t want to do that, there’s always crappy junk food and crappier movies.”

“Is Tim going to get jealous?” he inquired slyly.

Steph burst out into raucous laughter. “Tim’s on babysitting duty. It’s his day to wrangle Demonspawn, since Dick’s locked in the library. Trust me, he doesn’t care how I spend my time right now, so long as I’m far away from the war zone.”

“Do you like her plat--platonic-ally?” Cass asked, trying out the syllables on her tongue.

He hadn’t thought about it in that light recently. Everything he felt for Barb could be ascribed to that, he supposed. His jealousy of Dick could be chalked up to protectiveness. His worship of her might just be a deep-seated respect. “Maybe,” he answered callously. “I haven’t felt any desire to fuck her recently, if that’s what you mean. But Goldie--I mean, they think he’s perfect, but he’s not, he’s going to break her heart. He has skeletons in his closet even _he_ doesn’t know about--”

“Look,” said Steph, suddenly earnest, “Cass and I, we love her too. She took us both in when nobody wanted us. She gave us _Batgirl_ , which--I mean, I can’t express how much that meant to me. Feeling--validated, like everything I was doing _mattered_. So I know it doesn’t seem like Dick is good enough for her, because he _isn’t_. But he’s what she wants, and if you respect her, you have to let her go through with it.”

“I know, okay? I don’t need fucking therapy,” he muttered, pushing himself off the bed and heading for the door. Cass shot out an arm and grabbed him neatly by the wrist.

“Listen now. You can--complain. Or remember. We’re good at hearing.”

He met her eyes, and found them full of sympathy, with a glint of humor that said, “in twenty years, you’re going to think this is funny.”

Jason nodded. “Okay, I get the point. Barbie, platonic, let her make her own choices. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome!” Steph gushed, going in for a hug. He neatly sidestepped. “Nuh-uh. We seal things with hugs. Rules of the Barbara’s Strays Club.”

“Bad name, bad rules,” observed Cass, inspecting her perfectly manicured fingernails.

“Fine!” pouted Steph, dragging Jason onto the bed between her and Cass. “I hate you guys, anyway. What do you want to watch? I was thinking Plan 9 from Outer Space, but I also brought Mortdecai, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, and that one where they brood at each other in the rain.”

Jason settled back against the wall, where Cass inexplicably decided to use him as a pillow. “Let’s watch them all. What’s on the menu?”  
“Caramel corn hors d'oeuvres, followed by cheese puffs for an entree, with French fries for dessert and chocolate for second dessert.”

Steph followed Cass’s example and used Jason as a pillow. He didn’t really mind as much as he thought he would.

He’d think over the Barbara thing in private. For the moment, he just wanted to watch crappy movies and forget.


	20. Negotiations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Dick and Barbara finally get their act together and have a conversation. Finally.

Dick leaned against a bookshelf. _Damn my family. Why couldn’t they just stay out of it?_

“Hey, Dick, I’m over here,” came a voice from the very back of the library. Dick made a beeline for the source of the sound, coming to a sudden stop behind her.

“Hi,” he said to the back of her head. She pushed her chair out from the desk and rotated it to face him, smiling wanly.

“Hi yourself. How are the ribs?”

He sat down on the desk carefully. “Healing. I’m sorry I was such an idiot about the comms. It really wasn’t my business whether or not you used the voice modulator.”

Babs reached gently out and squeezed his knee in forgiveness. He rested his hand on hers, feeling its warmth. “So, escape artist wonder,” she whispered, glancing at the door as if she still thought Damian might be listening, “are there any ways out of this place?”

Dick shook his head. “Tim’s smart, and if Cass was in on it, we’re trapped. I used to be able to make it through the windows, but I’m hardly the Boy Wonder I used to be.”

“Don’t give yourself a hard time. It’s not like I’m going to be any use at getting us out of here. You heard Dami’s little Freudian slip. They padlocked us in, and I don’t think there’s any way to pick it from this side. We could break it down, but Bruce would have an apoplectic fit. How long until Alfred notices we’re gone?”

She’d jerked her hand back down to her lap, but her head was a breath away from leaning on the side of his leg. He held himself completely still while he considered, afraid that if he moved, she would twist away. “Depends on how well Dami and Steph avoid being seen. If Alfie sees them, he’ll wonder why they’re not with us. If not, then—well, he’ll probably notice when he calls us for dinner, which gives us—” he glanced at his watch “—roughly six hours.”

She moaned. “I wanted a nap.” She seemed significantly less mad at him, which was nice. It would make it a lot easier for him to apologize.

Dick chuckled. “Me too. Anyway, if you don’t want to talk, then we could read? Or if you have something to work on, that’s cool.”

“They cut off my Wi-fi. And also my cell service, so calling for help isn’t an option.”

“Okay, then. So work is out, escape is out. Um, how about reading? I mean, I’ve read practically everything in here, but—”

“Let’s talk,” she said firmly. He gaped at her slightly. She repeated it. “Let’s talk. I wanted to talk tonight, but now’ll do.”

“Uh…okay. Talking it is, then. I wanted to talk to you, also, actually. A lot. Even though I wasn’t really sure when I’d do it.”

There was an awkward pause. “I’m sorry--” they began in unison. They broke off, laughing slightly.

Babs tugged at his wrist. “Can you get off the table? There are chairs here, readily available, and I’m kind of getting an ache in my neck craning up to look at you.”

Dick made a mock bow as he hopped down. “Your wish is my command.”

He watched her face darken. “Please don’t say things like that. It—feels wrong, when you’re all--chivalrous. I don’t deser--it makes me uncomfortable.”

Dick didn’t understand, but he nodded. “Sorry. How do you want to structure this? Two minutes argument, one minute rebuttal, one minute counterargument, and switch, then open debate? Or we could do it like Truth or Dare, but without the dares. Just take turns asking each other questions.”

She held his gaze as he found a chair. “Let’s skip that. I’ve done some thinking, and--I just want to explain what I came up with.”

“You sure? If you don’t want to debate, I think Truth or Dare might be more efficient.” He felt a sudden urge to smack himself over the head for that one. _Why can’t I just be sincere?_

Babs groaned. “Don’t you dare remind me of that. Ever.”

He bit his lip before he could roll out one of his patented flirty comebacks. “Should we toss for who gets to start?”

“I call heads. I want to be prepared in case you stole one of Two-Face’s coins.”

The coin came up tails.

“Okay. Um, okay, wow, I’m nervous. Figures. I--I’m sorry. I am so, so, so sorry, and I don’t know how the hell I’m going to make it up to you.”

Barbara cocked an eyebrow at him. “Really? All you did was propose. Unless you’ve got a secret family somewhere I don’t know about, I’d say one sorry cuts it.”

“Have you left Gotham since the Joker?” he blurted.

Her eyebrows furrowed. “Huh?”

“I don’t know, Babs. I just--I realized that I’ve been trying to find myself since I was seventeen, and I never thought about whether you knew what you wanted. So, I mean, you were always there for me, so I figure I can wait for you. Whatever it takes.”

He hadn’t been sure what reaction to expect, but laughter certainly hadn’t been on the list of possibilities. He regarded her with a slightly injured glare. “Dick, I’m sorry, it’s just funny. I don’t feel the burning need to leave Gotham. If I was going to leave Gotham, I would have done it when you asked me to. It’s kids who do stuff like that. Not me.”

“I--I’m sorry I’m immature--”

“Don’t change it.”

Babs was full of surprises today, apparently. “Huh?”

“I love it. Do you think I would have dated you if you acted all “ _I am the Night_ ” all the time?”

He laughed. “Glad you didn’t date me for the outfit. Anyway, it was a stupid idea.”

“The outfit? You just realized it was dumb?”

“No. I meant before. You don’t need me to wait for you.”

She folded her hands on her lap. “I figured out what I wanted last night. By the way, our parents are kind of freakily eager to get us married. They’d probably have locked us up themselves if your siblings didn’t beat them to it. I called my dad to yell at him, anyway, and when I got off--I realized that I missed you. I needed someone to rant to.”

“Ho--hold up. You’re saying that Bruce talked to your dad about getting us married, you heard it, and you chose not to record it to show to me? Really, Babs?”

She grinned. “Wrong. Bruce, my dad, _and Alfred_.”

“I hate you, Barbara Gordon.”

She sighed exaggeratedly. “Well, it was good while it lasted. Anyway, we’d best get back on topic.” She took a deep breath, fingers curling on the sides of the wheelchair. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I mean that. I am one-hundred-percent sure of it. And the main reason I turned you down before was that I was upset that you walked out on me the day before. Stupid, I know.”

“Damian stole the ring.”

Babs laughed gleefully. “You know that when you say that, it comes out sounding like “The dog ate my homework,” right?”

“Okay, but what about the other stuff? You know, me being in love with Batgirl and all?”

She scoffed. “Dick, are you, at this moment, in love with my younger self?”

“No.”

“Then that’s tha--”

He hugged her, hard. He had missed this so much, the easy camaraderie between them. “I’m sorry, I missed you,” he whispered, over and over. But she stiffened, and he pulled away, feeling rather idiotic. “Sorry. I was out of line.”

There was an odd, almost pained expression on her face. “No, it’s not you, it’s--I’ve been keeping something from you.”

His throat went suddenly dry, and his heart hammered double-time. Dick forced himself to swallow. “What, you have a family on the side?” he quipped.

Her face twisted miserably. Dick felt a stab of foreboding. “I need a drink,” Barbara muttered, half to herself. He watched, almost in fascination, as she squared her shoulders and composed her face. He’d never been very good at pretending not to care.

“I can’t have kids.”

There was only a tiny sliver of silence before Dick realized that he had begun to babble. “Oh, um, that’s okay, um that’s fine, great really, not great for you obviously, but we can adopt, just like Bruce, or we don’t have to do kids if you don’t want them. I mean, obviously, you’d be a great mom, but if you don’t want that, it’s fine, we never talked about it, I mean, so I guess we should do that, but for my side of things I kind of wish I could adopt Dami here and now if you know what I mean--”

“Are you mad? That I didn’t tell you?”

He swallowed and readjusted his thoughts. “No! Of course not. It’s not like I left you any space to say it in.” A sudden thought struck him. He leaned over to her, looking gently into her eyes. “Babs? Is that why?”

She stifled a half-sob. “Maybe. I don’t know. It was probably part of it. I should have told you.”

He knelt down and held her shaking shoulders. “I’m fine. It’s going to be okay. I love you, it’s okay.”

When she’d finished, she pushed her hair back from her damp face and eyed his sodden shirt. “Sorry. I’m a mess, and I don’t have a clue why.”

“It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”

“It’s going to be dangerous,” she warned. “We’re painting a massive target on each other’s backs.”

Dick squeezed her hand. “Do you care?”

She considered that for a second, chewing absentmindedly on her lower lip. “Only for you. I don’t care about your enemies getting wind of me.”

“I care about my enemies finding you. You know, we don’t have to--”

“The danger’s worth it.”

It was almost startling, how quickly they had found themselves to be of one mind. “It is, isn’t it?”

“Steph’s going to be really smug.”

Dick groaned. “Damian’s going to be worse. Speaking of, we should probably work on getting them to let us out.” He hopped to his feet and started to look for something to bang at the door with.

A half-raised eyebrow from Babs stopped him. “Um, Boy Wonder, you’re forgetting something.” He squinted for a moment.

“Babs, is there a reason you’re giving me the fing-- _oh_.”

She backtracked immediately, blushing red as her hair. “I mean, I thought that was what we decided. If we’re married, the adoption agencies will be much more likely to consider us. We could do a long engagement, if you want. I just thought it might help remind us to talk to each other, instead of letting things get this far out of hand.”

Striking a pose, Dick declaimed, “Oh no! If only I hadn’t melodramatically thrown the ring into the lake! She’ll never marry me NOW!”

Barbara clapped indulgently. “Bravo, bravo!”

He found it in his pocket (no doubt slipped in there by Damian) and tossed it to her. She caught it without looking and extracted the ring in two seconds flat.

“So this is real, then.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yes, Dick, it’s real. You proposed, we squabbled like idiots, your siblings crossed a line and probably broke the law, and then I cried all over your shirt and said yes.” She held the ring up to the light, smiling at it as she spoke. “You know, we’re not through yet. We’ll have to have a long, serious meeting with Bruce about how to handle this in terms of our secret identities. I imagine that there’ll have to be some adjustments made to your public persona, so it doesn’t seem too weird when you get engaged. Then, if he gives the go-ahead for Dick Grayson, we have to have a long, serious meeting with a bunch of lawyers, who will throw around a lot of money words at us. Then, we’ll probably have to have a long, serious meeting with the Justice League, to convince them that it’s alright for us to get married to each other. I imagine they’ll think it’s like an inter-office relationship: cute, but a bad idea. Then, we have to do press conferences, galas, and parties, while simultaneously hoping that our friends are doing good wedding planning, since there’s no way we’ll find the time to lift a finger to it. _Then_ , if all goes well, I guess, we sit back, relax, and hope that Penguin doesn’t crash the reception.”

“I love the way your head works. What comes next?”

She leaned her head on the chair, with a smile that could almost have been dreamy. “The rest of our lives, however long that ends up being.”

He lifted her out of the chair. “Let’s make it count.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's the end! Thanks to everyone who read this, especially those who left kudos and/or comments! 
> 
> I actually have some sequel ideas, so I might do that! 
> 
> Please let me know what you think! I'm really honored by the positive reactions this fic has gotten!

**Author's Note:**

> Please please leave comments!!! They make my day!!!


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